Primary school application – location question

[Clovelly123]

Hi Mumsnet,

Our daughter will be turning 3 in July, and we plan to apply for a place at primary school before the January 2025 deadline (she would then start in September).

At the moment, we own a house in Bristol but would love to secure a primary school space in Devon. Our original plan was to re-locate to Devon just a few months prior to our daughter starting at school, but I understand that not having a postcode in the area at the time of application may significantly hinder our chances of securing a place. Based on this I have a couple of questions and would hugely appreciate any insights you can share :)

• Is it compulsory to have a registered address in the area we are applying for schools? If not, am I correct in thinking our chances of securing a place would be quite slim? (i.e if we were to apply in Devon using a Bristol address).

• Are there any workarounds to be aware of, where we could apply based on our current address, but still have a strong chance of securing a space in Devon?

Ultimately, we are trying to decide if we need to speed up the process of renting accommodation in the Devon area (i.e to be located there when submitting our school application), or if this could feasibly be delayed until a little later in 2025.

Thanks so much for reading,
Charlotte

The address you apply from must be your primary residence- where you pay council tax etc.
Is it your intention to rent in Devon, then move back to Bristol when you have a place at a primary school? If so, that’s classed as fraud and the place can be removed.

If you can find a school that is consistently under-subscribed (ie places offered always less than its published PAN, and also currently well below capacity) then you could be lucky, as it is possible that everyone who applies to that school will be admitted.

However, the usual reasons for a school being consistently under-subscribed are that it is either very isolated (which would then tie you to a small area for house-hunting and/or mean a long commute) or, more commonly, that it is a school with a poor reputation that locals avoid if at all possible.

We moved across the country between the normal allocation day and September, applying for an in-year place for our elder child and a Reception place for DD.

We were given the in-year place from our old address, but had to take it up within 2 weeks. Dd was placed at the bottom of the waiting list.

We jumped up the waiting list when our older child started (sibling) and again when we moved into a house round the corner from the school. We were eventually allocated a place 3 days before the end if the Summer term.

So another way you could play this is to apply from Bristol, get on a waiting list, move right next to your desired school (waiting lists are held in order of admission criteria, not on date) and cross your fingers for waiting list movement . Generally, waiting lists move most for relatively large ‘second tier’ schools in larger towns with several private options.

Thank you! To confirm, no – once in Devon we would remain in Devon, with no intention to move back to Bristol or elsewhere.

It really varies so I think you need to research the local primary schools in the area you want to move to. For example I live in Folkestone and we have several primary schools which are well thought of and also undersubscribed, so you could potentially gain a place at those schools from a distant town. See if you can join any local parents groups for the new area (eg whats app, facebook) so you can get some advice.

If you apply whilst living in Bristol then you are not likely to get a space at your preferred schools and as probably the applicant living the furthest away from any school in Devon you would just be allocated a school which had spaces left at the end which is likely to be the one no-one else wants to go to!

There is a falling birth rate in most parts
Lots of schools in Devon are not full. You need to check once you decide where you want to live

Most people move for the application deadline not start date. We had to do this and many do it at secondary to. If you don't you end up bottom of the list and could be given any school where three is a place.

It was all really stressful at the time

I agree with the advice to research specific schools because the situation varies hugely from place to place. I'm not in Devon, but another rural holiday destination type area and actually a lot of very good schools are undersubscribed, or at least will take pupils from a long way away. The fact that so many houses here are second homes or holiday lets and a significant proportion of residents are people who moved here to retire, means that lots of schools, even really good ones, are undersubscibed as there just aren't that many families with school aged children in their catchment areas.
The primary school my DC went to can pretty much always accept in year admissions and that's not because there's anything wrong with it. You could move into our area and have a choice of good primary schools in various villages most of the time. I have no idea what the situation will be like in the part of Devon you're interested in, but things are often very different in rural areas to cities and big towns where you need to live virtually on the doorstep of a school to get in. I'd start by researching possible places to live and find out what admissions data have been in the last few years.

This. OP, the situation that others are saying about schools being undersubscribed because no one wants them doesn’t really apply in parts of Devon. Even Exeter, which as a city you might expect to have more pressure on school places, has highly rated and highly thought of undersubscribed primaries. Have a look at this link: https://www.devon.gov.uk/educationandfamilies/school-information/apply-for-a-school-place/apply-for-a-primary-school-place and see the spreadsheet on the ‘Offer Day’ tab for a description of the offers on allocation day last year to give you an idea. As others have said, you don’t necessarily need a Devon address to be given a place, and if a school is undersubscribed you would still be offered a place based on your Bristol address.

Devon is the third largest county in England! Are you able to let us know what area of Devon you are thinking of moving to?

Most of Devon shouldn’t be an issue. However, if you are moving to an area where there are lots of new build houses it could be. I had a friend move to Pinhoe (just north of Exeter and she applied for a reception place for her child and didn’t get into her closest school which was 400 meters away!

If applying from an address in Bristol, the CAF must be submitted via the local authority there and any 'nearest undersubscribed' school offer would be the one nearest to the Bristol address. It can't be a Devon school because you have no address there for it to be nearest to, plus, as you are resident elsewhere, the Devon LA has no obligation to find you a school at this stage, whereas you current LA will have.

If you are completely sure that you are going to move, name schools in the relevant area of Devon as all your preferences (you can do this on the Bristol CAF, but may need to contact your local admissions team i the schools you are looking for dont appear on a drop,down i initially).You may be lucky and one of them is undersubscribed and therefore you will be offered it on National Offer Day, as a pp has said. If not, you will be on the waiting list for all your preferences from the outset.

If not 100% sure about the move, use the last preference on your CAF for a Bristol school that you would be likely to get and happy with.

Like others have said,it depends on whether schools have more applicants than places. You're lucky in that birth rates have been declining so in general there is less pressure on reception admissions.

If you put a Devon school as one of your preferences and it has fewer applicants than places available, you're in! They can't refuse you based on the fact you live miles away or currently live in a different local authority (LA).

If you are still living away when you apply, you'd normally apply to your current home LA. They should then liaise with whichever schools you've named as preferences in the new LA area (or the admission authorities for those schools). As regards situations where you move and then apply, even in very oversubscribed areas and birth years, an acceptable place is usually found. Your new home LA has to find a place somewhere in this situation, and won't generally offer one further away than 2 miles as then, they have to pay for transport.

You would be well advised to move to your new home in Devon before the on-time application deadline. This will enable you to get everything in place, such as registering with a new GP, sorting out your Council Tax etc. The only special categories of pupils that apply in advance of moving into an area are service families as part of the Armed Forces Covenant.

Anyone in England can apply for any state school in England from their current place of residence; even if the actual process (e.g possibly needing to submit a paper copy of the CAF instead of completing the online version) may need to be slightly different where schools in further-flung LAs are involved, you can apply outside your own LA and you must, in any case make main admission round applications through your current home LA. Unless its a grammar school, when a school is undersubscribed, all applicants must be offered a place. Oversubscribed schools where the applicant would only be ranked in the lowest, usually, 'all other applicants, on distance' criterion almost certainly would not be able to offer, but e.g. a faith school where adherence to the faith trumps locality, possibly, if the distant applicant has the right credentials to put them high enough up the school's ranking.

There wouldn't be any 'special treatment' in the form of privilege, if applying from another LA, but nor would there be any 'special detriment' - they would just be ranked against each school's oversubscription criteria, along with everyone else.

That's an incorrect assumption. Birth rates are falling and therefore many schools haven't been at PAN for several years now, despite having a good Ofsted and reputation in the local area.

It's wrong to assume a school must be underperforming simply because they have spaces. In the LA I work in, less than half of the schools were full for Reception last year. When the figures were released on offer day, many well respected schools were surprisingly showing on the list of schools which still had spaces.

Obviously this won't be the same picture for the whole of the country, but it's not unusual these days for schools to not reach PAN because there are more school places available than there are children requiring them (for Reception).

OP - you would be making life a lot simpler for yourselves if you have moved by the end of 2024. That way you'll have a local address before you apply by the deadline of mid-January 2025. Anything else simply causes complications which means you'd be at a high risk of being allocated a school you're not happy with when you finally do move. If you can move this year I would 100% do it.

This is very true in my little part of Devon! My eldest is in Y3 and our school was oversubscribed that year, lots of people didn't get in, even children with siblings at the school, caused a lot of upset!
But every year since it has been undersubscribed as have the other schools nearby!

I apologise. I come from an area where every single good school is full in Reception- and in some years every single school is full in Reception - and posted from that perspective.

If that was the case the OP would not be obliged to take up the place in September but could go on the waiting list for preferred Devon schools, which is probably what they are going to have to do anyway.

One thing I would say OP is to apply for a banker school local to where you are living now, because the best laid plans etc, and it would be Sod’s law that you got offered the perfect school in Devon the week after you realised you needed to stay in Bristol for another year!