Moving home after primary school place offered

[Sajani]

Hi

Before I get a roasting for ‘playing the system’, please read the background!

We always intended to move homes back to the village I grew up in advance of our son starting school and becoming more ‘tied’ to an area.

We were well on the way to purchasing house 1 in March 2020, then Covid hit and the vendors pulled out because of the uncertainty. In August 2020, the vendor of house 2 pulled out when we requested an additional specialist survey following concerns in the generic survey. Last month the vendors of house 3 have basically gone AWOL so we assume this has also fell through.

In the mean time, we sold our old home and moved into rented accommodation in September 2020, in the village we are desperately trying to buy in.

The village has 3 schools, all Ofsted outstanding and usually oversubscribed. We’d have been more than happy with any of these schools, but got our first choice which was the catchment school for our rented address. We tried to buy in this catchment twice and another catchment once, but always in the same village.

We’re now back to looking for yet another property to buy and there’s absolutely nothing of interest in the same catchment. There are houses that would fall in the other catchments (still easy walking distance to the offered school) but the LA won’t clearly answer whether moving after the offer has been made has any effect on the offer made!

From what I can gather from friends, all three schools are full this year. Is there any clear cut guidance on what the position is in this situation?

I know that after the first term is complete that they can’t withdraw a place, but we’re really miserable in this rented accommodation and really need the light at the end of the tunnel of our own house so we’re keen to kick off the search again.

Thank you for any thoughts.

It's really hard and I sympathise with the OP, but you have to be really careful with this stuff. The definition of an address is to do with where the child sleeps for the majority of nights per week, so if the family took a short term rent just to sleep in, then this would still count as a house move I think. Possibly the best thing for the OP if they can't bear to stay where they are, is to try to find a temporary rental that's nearer to the school than the one they're already in - so that they would still have got an offer regardless of which address was used. The LA is unlikely to then care about the move. The OP could then look for a permanent move after Christmas, when it's highly unlikely that the LA would still withdraw the place.

It is really hard OP, but unfortunately there are lots of people out there trying to game the system, so they have to have pretty strict rules in place, which unfortunately have an impact on people like you who aren't trying to game it at all. I believe that some secondary schools require families to have lived in catchment for up to a year or more before the application deadline in order to qualify for a place. Really tough on anyone who doesn't have their life mapped out years ahead!

@RandomMess

Sounds extreme but short term can you find an air B&B or one bed place to rent or anything so you can go sleep there at night time?

It sounds horrific where you are renting and buying anywhere could still take quite some time

We’re counting on lockdown easing and being able to do alternate short stints at our parents’ houses soon.

Thankfully, our son sleeps like a log and has never been bothered by the noise! As it’s not violent noise and just incredibly unsociable we are happy enough for him to be here, which is lucky because we need to be close enough to walk him to his nursery as we can’t drive and would need to rely on lifts.

So I expect when we can we will have a go with one adult and our son staying in the nightmare house and one parent sleeping in a bed, in the quiet. I’m hoping this does the trick, as everything seems better when you’re not exhausted!

@Sajani I would seriously look for a room to rent now so you could alternate nights.

You and DH and DC would still be a bubble!

@salviohexia

It's really hard and I sympathise with the OP, but you have to be really careful with this stuff. The definition of an address is to do with where the child sleeps for the majority of nights per week, so if the family took a short term rent just to sleep in, then this would still count as a house move I think. Possibly the best thing for the OP if they can't bear to stay where they are, is to try to find a temporary rental that's nearer to the school than the one they're already in - so that they would still have got an offer regardless of which address was used. The LA is unlikely to then care about the move. The OP could then look for a permanent move after Christmas, when it's highly unlikely that the LA would still withdraw the place.

Thanks for your reasonable approach and looking at it from both sides.

We’re already doing as you suggest and looking for either another rental or property to buy in catchment (in some ways, the light at the end of a tunnel really helped with mindset even though it had no bearing on lack of sleep, so buying is still an option even if it takes 3 months or so).

The ultimate aim has always is to buy in this catchment as it’s the ‘old’ side of the village and has the type of house we want to live in (hence why we took a rental here, as I love the idea of school friends only being a street or two away). They seem to come up fairly regularly and as most of them are almost identical we wouldn’t be too picky about buying, so hopefully one comes up soon that we can throw our hat in the ring to buy!

Just to say again, any admission authority that removes places simply because the family moves is in breach of the Admissions Code. If, however, the move shows that the original application was fraudulent or deliberately misleading they can remove the place.