new address not in catchment area for any primary school

[anukis]

Hi everyone, I am new here and tried to find an answer by reading older posts but no luck...

We've just moved to the Ealing Common area in London. It's a brand new building (we're the first to live in our flat), just recently completed construction. Our daughted has just turned 3 and we're planning on enrolling her in primary school for next year.

However, I went to the Ealing council website to look up the catchment area for our address, to find out which school we would have better chances to get her into and the only result that is returned for our address is a Junior school for 7-11 yr old children. Does that mean we are out of luck and our adress is not allocated to any primary school that takes 4 and 5-yr olds? or perhaps their catchment maps are not updated to include the newly constructed buildings addresses?

Thanks!

Hi, we had this problem a few years back when we moved to a new housing estate. The primary school had been allocated by the council, but was not on the "on line" service. We just rang the local govement helpline, and they were able to tell us which school of the 2 nearest now included our estate.
Hope this helps.

Ealing do operate a catchment area system that gives priority to children living in catchment, so you need to get this resolved before you make decisions on what your preferences are and more especially before Ealing LA do any decision making.
Your address will have to be allocated to a school catchment area because otherwise you will be disadvantaged in the admission process. So I would email the admissions office of the LA and ask them to confirm in writing which is your catchment school.
This will obviously be the school where you will be highest on the admission criteria order and I would always advise putting the catchment school down as one of your preferences, even if you want to go to another school. As all LAs have to use what is called the Equal Preference Scheme for school place allocation. You can put two other schools down as first and second preference and if you are high enough on the allocation list you will get a place at one of these two schools. As long as the catchment school is put down as third preference you should have a good chance of being allocated that school as the fall back position if your two prefered schools do not get allocated.

As far as I know, Ealing Common does not itself have primary schools - your nearest schools would be Acton schools. Ealing primaries have had a real shortage of places for Reception classes and lots of Acton schools have had to operate bulge classes/ additional forms to cope with demand. Get on to Perceval House as soon as you can.

Thank you very much everyone for the responses! I wish I had this information prior to moving here 2 months ago but I guess now it's too late... Thank God we're renting and are not stuck here for a long time.

The primary school that's listed as the catchment area school when I look up our address now is Berrymede Junior School, but that school only takes 7-11 year olds. I did try to look up a house down the road but I get the same result.

I'm now very curious about which catchment area we are 'allocated' to... I'll ring the admissions service tomorrow. The closest schools on the map is West Acton Primary, which seems okay according to Ofstead anyway.

If anyone has any feedback at all about schools in the area, I'd really appreciate it, as I only have the Ofsted reports that I go by. I tried to ask some parents at my daughter's nursery but all of them live far from where we are and weren't very helpful.