What happens if you move houses during term-time (or before school starts)

[FlorenceofArabia]

My DD (aged 4) is due to start school in Sept and I've put her name down for our village primary school. However, my husband has recently been made redundant and it's looking increasingly likely that we are going to have to move some distance for him to find work.

If we were to move to a new city in, say, August what would happen about our DD starting school? Or if we were to move in October?

I know that she doesn't legally have to start school until Jan 10, i.e. the term after her 5th birthday but I'm wondering how the LEA will allocate her to a school.
Any info would be much appreciated.

This happened to us just as DS was about to start school. You generally have to wait until you have an address (backed up by bills/tenancy agreement etc) in the new area before you can apply.

We moved right at the beginning of September - he should literally have started school that same week - and as soon as we were in I made appointments to look round schools, picked one and applied via the LEA. It took about a week from applying to getting the place offered from them and then I arranged a start date with the school. I think he started the first week of October.

It's obviously not ideal but ds was fine and the good thing was that because the school year had already started, the head of the school I loved for him was able to tell me categorically that she had space for him, rather than us having to wait for the offer to know. The bit that took longest was arranging to look around - obviously you want to do that when the children are back at school and you can't just turn up.

We actually moved again (job went horribly wrong) a couple of years later, and the procedure was just the same moving mid-year into a different area too. So I have some experience of this!

Have you been offered a place there? I don't know where you stand if you move before the start date, but if you move after she has started, even if it's out of the area, your child does not have to move schools. That's how it is in my LEA (Surrey).