Relocation with work- what are the steps required for new primary school selection?

[Lizzie0174]

I have the potential to move to a new (better) job role which will require a relocation (200miles..) and selection of a new primary school for my DD (yr4) and DS (reception).
I'm not sure what the process would be on finding a new home and school as we will probably live with my parents for a time while we sell our house and find a new one as the folks live near to the area where we will be looking. Will a school accept children that don't live in the area but are intending to?

What would be the first steps to take?

It all depends on the situation around school places. In theory you can request school places from any where in the country and if there are spaces then the admission authority has to give you the places.The problem of course is that most of the best schools will not have a place in both reception and year 4 immediately available.
Also many admission authorities are loath to do anything about allocating school places unless they have a new address in the locality.
If you know that you are going to be living with parents for say three months plus I would use their address and apply for local schools, with a note that clearly says that this is your parents house and that you will with time be moving to a new local address. The LA admission office can help by telling you where there are places but you need to be careful in explaining to them what year your youngest is in, is it current reception or reception in September? The admission office will be "tuned" into reception admissions in September as it is that time of year.
My guess is that you may well need to go to appeal to gain places for both children in one school and in that case, you need to understand that it is far more likely that you will struggle to get the reception year place as the infant class size regs severely limit the ability to admit. If you have to chose a school for one only, I would be tempted to go for the reception age place and appeal for the year 4, it is a lot easy to get admission then as long as the class is not already at 33 to 35 pupils.

admission can I jump in and ask a further question. We might be in the same situation as the OP - we think we'll have to relocate over the summer to Kent. We have one DS who is due to start reception in September.

My plan was to ask the admission authorities at end of March (when offers have been made) to give me a steer on the schools likely to have places (so we can focus our property search) and then contact them again start of May (after the LEA-administered waiting list decisions have been issued) to find out what schools still have places and make our property decision on that basis. Is this the best way of approaching things, or can we actually apply and be offered a place (if it is an undersubscribed school and doesn't have a waiting list) before we have an address?

I can't get my head around the best way to approach this!

You will need to ask Kent exactly what their policy is, as different LAs have different policies. The date when Kent give out initial allocations is 30th March and it will only be after this date that they will have any idea what places are available in which school. If there are places then you should be able to claim a place.

Thank you! I will speak to Kent tomorrow about this to confirm if we can do anything before moving down. I'm guessing anyway that the schools we have our eye on will end up having waiting lists rather than spaces, so I presume we would go on the waiting lists (and, given our address up North, we would remain right at the bottom until we move house!)

Like the OP, my parents live fairly locally (10 miles) to the area we would like to move to. Can we use their address when it comes to applying for places/going on waiting lists - if we were to be offered a place, and we hadn't found a house yet, we would live with them so DS could start school. I know this is a no-no for when you initially apply for reception admissions, but is it also the case when applying late/via the waiting lists as we would be?

Also, at what stage would we 'lose' our place up here (i.e. what is the point of no return) - is it when you accept a place in another school? If for example, we found a school in Kent with places and applied and were offered one of the places, would our current LEA be notified and withdraw the place up here?

Thanks in advance (and apologies OP for hijacking!)