Managing exchanging/completion dates v school

[coffeeneeded]

We are the third in a chain of 4 and the only ones with school age children (6 yr old twins) to contend with.

Our buyers and sellers both want swift exchanges/completion, preferably by mid November but our kids are at school until mid December.

The house we are moving to is an hour away from our current house so no chance of commute to school.

We'd rather not rent for financial and wellbeing reasons but I'm wondering if that may be our only choice. I don't think there is anyone we can stay with.

WWYD?

Can't you de-register them from their current school? Then you're not taking them out of school, if you don't have a place immediately at a new school you can home educate until you have a place. Don't worry, highly unlikely that anybody will check up on your home education!

Hi again all.

You were very helpful last time so I'm here with another question /update

We have finally exchanged on our house and will be completing on December 6th. There are two issues.

1- we can apply for three schools on the form. I Emailed the three local schools and no one has space in my kids year group....

And

2- Our new local authority has a four week window to apply for a school, so do we apply now (and possibly have 1 week before Christmas at a new school) or apply the week we move for January?

What happens if no local schools have room?

And, if we apply the week we move we may get very lucky and someone might announce they are leaving after the hols and leave room for us at one of our local schools. But Doing that, we might miss an opportunity to get in the waitlist (which means I should apply for the schools now)

I hope that makes sense to you. I'm very confused and not sure what to do. The thought of homeschooling my 6yr old twins fills be with utter horror.

Apply now. I think you'll be lucky to have a new place sorted before Christmas though, even if there's a school with two places available now!
The admin involved takes time.

I'm not bothered about getting them into school before Christmas... I guess it's more about the best time to place the bet, but I'm guessing there's no good time.

I'd get it in as soon as possible - we found in-year applications moved pretty quickly. Applied the earliest we could, 4 weeks before move date, heard which school place we had within a few days. They have to allocate you a school so they'll go to whichever is the nearest that has spaces.

We found 3 local schools all with one place available, but any of those could have been taken before our application went in!

Apply now. You may well be given no place at any school, and have to appeal - the sooner you get the process kicked off, the better.

Towards the end of a term is a great time to start a new school, if it does work out. Especially Christmas, as there will be so much social stuff going on. Means you start the new term just as a normal pupil, not ‘the new kid’, and probably with some friends.

DS started a new school aged 6 with 3 weeks to go to the end of Year 1. Had a really smooth settling in, friends to meet over the summer and a straightforward start to the next school year.

Also, if there are no spaces but someone moves at Christmas, already being on the waiting list gives you the ‘inside track’ for those.