Relocating to wales, how to apply to primary school?

[LeMousquetaireAnonyme]

We might be relocating to wales during this summer. We have been overseas since DD1 is 3 and a bit, so we missed all the registration things when we were there.
How does it work?
I have been reading on here about the fact that we have to apply only when we are on the UK territory, ofsted reports.... But it is only for england, isn't it?

I can't find anything about Wales. I know the 3 schools which are within walking distance from our house (if we can get it back), they don't seem to appear on any report.

Do I have to wait till we are there? Won't the schools or the organising bodies (= names?) be closed in July? How to find so kind of comparison between schools? catchment?

DD1 had started at a playschool which fed one of the school but I would guess it doesn't matter anymore after more than 4 years.
She will enter Y3 in september (UK, is it the same in wales?).

TIA

Where in Wales? Have you checked the Local Authority website?

I suspect that you might have to be resident in the UK before you can apply for a place, but I might be wrong.

'Feeder' playschools are a myth anyway. Places are allocated on a criteria of SN requirements, catchment and whether siblings are already at the school.

Yes, Y3 is the same in Wales.

Estyn is Wales' equivalent of Ofsted.

Just look on the council website for the area you will be moving to, send an email or phone with dates of moving, dates of wanting to start, etc, and they will tell you what you need to do.

Thanks Fun, I will dig a bit more. Last time, I ended up with a lot of site in welsh with the english version being down, and with my 2 yo at home I got really .

Is it call the education board, local authorities? or something else? I might be googling the wrong key words [thick emoticon].

South wales/border with the UK.

If you pm me the town where you'll be moving to, I can find the right link for you .

Most authorities have it under a section entitled 'education and children's services' or something similar.

Wales doesn't publish SATs results in the same way that England does. They do still do the tests but they are marked internally by the schools and so there isn't the same importance placed upon them as in England. I had no idea when DS1 actually took his SATs. Our school puts them in the back of their prospectus, so it might be worth contacting the relevant schools and asking them to send you a prospectus - or see if they are on their websites.
There is a banding system for secondary schools that puts a secondary school into a group of schools across Wales that are all technically similar e.g. same number of pupils on free school meals, similar size school, similar areas (urban/rural etc) and then rates the school within them. These were published on the news recently under a freedom of information act. I don't think they did the same with primary schools.
The 'ofsted' reports are 'estyn' reports and should be available in English and sometimes Welsh too.

fun I found my council page and my "shire" site but there is just a list of schools with phone numbers.

Does this means that I have to call the schools I am interested in and deal with them directly? or is there a "LEA" where you apply with a wish list and assigned you somewhere? That is what I can't find.

Oh! thanks green

I am old and not english, and DD1 is my first so all my school knowledge is from abroad... Hence the massive confusion , not helped by the fact that we don't really know where we are going. Wales is our fail safe.

We moved from South Wales to North Wales when DS1 was mid way through a school year. When we arrived we went and looked around the schools in the area. Chose the one we liked, they had room so took him straight away. We didn't apply via the LEA. However, it was a church school so they do normally deal with their own applications anyway, not sure if we had applied to the Welsh school or non-CofE school if we would have had to send their applications via the authority or not.

You should officially go through the local authority for the area, the shire is the local authority, which ever one it is, look under childrens services or education. Having said that schools in wales do seem to be far more open to direct approaches to the school.
One thing that you need to be careful about is what kind of school it is, english medium, welsh medium or bi-lingual. Welsh will be taught in all but to a varying degree. If you go to the Estyn site then inspection information you can then search by postcode for schools. Each school is inspected every 6 years and the latest version of the inspection code came in September 2010. It is not possible to directly correlate pre-sept 2010 reports with ones after that but generally the inspection is now much more searching and the overall results are less then previously.

Thanks all. I finally found what I needed to understand everything (well almost because we are a special case and already missed the deadline).
It was called a "Starting school booklet" it took a bit lot of faffing around the council web site during DD2's nap to get to it.

Thats good news, hope that the move goes smoothly .

Monmouthshire? nice area, County Hall in Cwmbran should provide you with the relvant info.