Mid year primary transfer

[Raaraaboonah]

We are moving house hoping to complete just before Christmas. We will need to move our children's schools and I'm trying to get my head around how it will work.

We have one child in KS2 and one in KS1. We have the option of 2 schools:

• the closer one is much smaller but apparently has spaces in both these years (at the moment)
• the larger school has a space for our KS2 child but not for the KS1 child.

We looked around them both and prefer the larger school for both our children for various reasons. We spoke to the HT who said that we were welcome to apply but they don't have space for our KS1 child but once the KS2 is in we could appeal for a place. They have previously had 31 in the particular class that our KS1 would go into so presumably they have the space to accommodate 31.

My difficulty is that in all i've looked at, it seems that in KS1 for an appeal to be successful, you have to show that they incorrectly applied the admissions criteria which with a mid year transfer I don't see how I can.

We can make all the arguments we like about how the larger school is more suitable for our KS1 than the smaller school but I don't understand how there is any point if we can't say they applied the admissions criteria incorrectly.

Am I missing something?

I don’t think you are missing anything! Unless they are hoping an appeal would be successful to give an existing sibling a place (which your ks2 would give you). I wonder if there is anyway of finding out about previous appeals.

TBH I would ring the local authority and ask them. They were really helpful when we recently did an in year transfer.

Also, between now and then the small school might not have enough space and the big one might gain a space. We knew there was only 1 space for our y5 child when applying for our preferred school and were keeping our fingers crossed no one was ahead of us in the transfer process.