Helpful suggestions needed for good C of E school Oxfordshire or Glo?

[looseleaf]

we have to leave our current flat but love our local school and don't know whether we'd ever find another so lovely!
I'd love to know if anyone knows of a good and maybe small village school. I've been looking for days on maps but just don't know how to narrow our property search and hoped if we find a lovely school who might consider DD (year 2) we could focus it better.

I don't even know how this works as we'd have to buy a new house and rent our flat out and move schools all at the same time and can we even apply without a local address ?!

Horspath in Oxford would fit the bill.

Technically, if they have a space, they have to give it to you wherever you live but you would need to take it up asap so that's not really practical! In practical terms you need an address so the LEA can offer you a place, it may not be in the school of your choice to start with of course if its full.

Thank you so much; this looks lovely and a helpful place to look

Are you looking at Glos/Oxfordshire border? Glos is a big county with many lovely small village schools with space. My children go to one, but we are quite a way from Oxfordshire.

We're looking at either county as don't know the areas well though like west Oxfordshire already and seeing a house there tomorrow.

Dh would need to travel to London for work once or twice a week and I also need to consider being near good possible jobs for when our 2 year old is at school.

However young your child seems at the moment, unless this is definitely a short term move you may want to start from secondaries and then work backwards to primaries. Particularly in the more rural areas of Oxon / Gloucs there is little effective secondary choice (unless you are near enough to Gloucester itself to consider the grammars) and some of the secondaries are better than others. [I believe that there is currently a propsal knocking around about rural secondary school transport, which may reduce the effective school choice even further].

So for example our old village school [West Oxon] wasn't that great - now much improved I understand - BUT it fed into a better secondary than the much better regarded primary just 2 or 3 miles away.

It may also help you to narrow down your area - if you find a secondary that you like the look of, then looking at its feeder primaries is an easy next step.

Travel into London from the more rural areas may be a bit of a pain, too. In / around West oxon, Lower Heyford has a station, as does Charlbury. Again, it may be worth working out viable train journeys into the necessary area of London and the best stations, then working out from there in your school hunt. It's not that distances are huge, but many of the roads, even many of the A-roads, are slow, and transport into the larger centres with bigger stations served by faster trains - especially Oxford itself - can be very sticky indeed.

This is great advice, thanks teacherwith2kids. I had thought fleetingly about secondaries but more at the back of my mind so am so glad you posted this, could save us a lot of hassle later!! So kind of you.
There are so many factors involved in choosing with location, jobs, transport, education then size of house for the area etc but this is really helping channel my search and thank you all