Relocating but not sure where, what to do regarding primary school place

[Shannon2021]

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone will be able to shed some light for us, with regards to moving house and applying for places at primary schools.

So we currently live in Islington north London, our son is 3 and will be 4 in November and he currently attends a nursery full time.

We are selling our property that we purchased from the council, but can not complete before May next year without owing the council money, so this is what we are aiming for as a moving date.

The issue we have, is that our budget limitations mean we can’t pick one particular area, or even county at this point.

We will be moving to either Hertfordshire or Essex, but where exactly is still open, as long as the area is nice, schools are good and transport links are good to London.

We understand that you need to register applications for primary schools in January for a place in September, but we probably won’t know what area we will be moving to until maybe March or April, so wouldn’t know what school to apply for. I wonder if anyone has been in this situation before?

Would the right thing to do be to narrow down the areas to a list of say 10 locations, and apply for schools in every area, knowing we will be potentially turning down 9 of them?

Hope this all makes sense, really could do with some advice on this.

Thanks in advance,

Shannon 

You cant do this. You apply to your local council for a primary place based on the address you live at.

You won't get into schools miles away even if same council unless they are very under subscribed.... And they are unlikely to be ones you would want...

You can apply to any school you like, BUT you need to do it from your permanent address at the time, and that address will be used for allocations. If you apply for schools some distance away, you are very unlikely to get any of them unless they are schools which are
very undersubscribed (and thus normally less desirable).

You will be restricted in how many schools you can apply for, depending on where you live - normally it's 3 or 6 - and will only get one offer. You don't get to pick and choose between multiple offers, and you only put one application form in, through your local LA.

The best thing in your situation if you are genuinely unsure is to apply to schools local to where you are now; that way, if everything falls through, you at least have a local place. Then once you know where you are going, put in a late application with the new address.

Since you'll be making a late application, you'll be looking at a place in an undersubscribed school, and/or going on the waiting list for your nearest ones. Waiting lists are not ordered by how long you've been on them, but by the oversubscription criteria. That means that if you move in right next door to a school in July, your child will go straight to number one on the waiting list.

When looking at areas to live, it may be worth considering how oversubscribed the schools are in the area. One particular thing to watch out for is brand new schools on new developments - they often have spare capacity until the development fills up.

Thank you HappyToday73 & Patricia, I feel a bit silly now asking the question, makes total sense regarding having to have an address in the area to put down on the application.

Also thanks Lanthanum, some good advice regarding new developments for us to consider.