Applying for schools when don’t have a home

[bubble55]

We sold our house but with the crazy horrible market, we’ve been living with parents for almost 18 months. We apply for school next year. I am terrified we won’t have a house by then. the area we want to live is nowhere by my parents house, 7 miles away, and we want to send our child to that school which I do pass every day on my way to work. My child will also be attending the feeder nursery as from next year.

we won’t be in the catchment area but would any of this be looked upon when applying? Or do they really not care and just go solely on your address? :( as we won’t be staying here.

Is it a state school? Then yes, your home address is pretty critical in the application process.

What you can do right now is to arm yourself with more information. This year's primary school applications are open, so on your LA website you should be able to find admissions info for parents applying this year. This will include the outcomes of last year's admissions, and show if your preferred school is oversubscribed, and if so, in what criteria the last child was admitted. Then you will know how likely or not you would be to get a place.

Can you rent in the area that you prefer for now?

They will go on your address, the rest is irrelevant, but if they aren’t full of children that live closer they will still give you a space.

You are really going to to have to rent or buy within catchment. There really isn't another solution.

Is it typically over subscribed ? If there are spare places in that cohort then you would get a place if you put it as first choice. Though children who live closer will have a higher priority. It really depends on whether or not there are enough local children applying to fill the spots.

For state schools, attending the nursery has no importance so that is not a factor. If you don't have a local house by then you need to use your parents address.

Can't you just rent in the area if there's nothing you want to buy yet?

Yes, it all turns on your current address. Local education authorities can’t give any weight to where parents plan to move to, because so many plans fall through. As others have said, if the school is undersubscribed, you may be able to get a place even from some distance away. In my LEA, the distance at which places are awarded has been increasingly, because rolls are dropping and there’s more slack in the system.

Check with the school, some schools/ trusts in my area have agreements in place that those children who attend the nursery are guaranteed a place in the reception class.

Just rent there?

We sold up, tried to buy and the place we wanted to buy fell through. We rented the first place that became available in the area we wanted to live in because we knew we needed (wanted, I suppose) a school place there rather than close to relatives, who’d offered to let us stay. We bought a street away from where we rented and DS is very happy in the school next to our house.

It felt a little like “gaming” the system, even though we always intended to move to the area and eventually ended up buying even closer to the school than the the rented property, but it’s what was necessary to ensure that the next 7 years of school would be at the school we wanted rather than having to organise crazy school runs every day and resenting the fact we’d not jumped through the hoops to get the space in the area we knew we’d be living.