Would you move for a secondary a while before you need it

[Longheath8]

We are looking to move house. We like where we live now, current primary is lovely but the secondary is awful. It is a special measures school, it has a bad reputation locally, even Google reviews are poor. I am a teacher and have had a student move to my school whose parents moved her from this because of the drug and knife issues. Another member of staff, not knowing where I live, commented a while back that it will always struggle because of the catchment area. I do not want my children in that school if I can help it.

The next town across has a secondary that has a very good reputation and has had for a long time. House prices are insane, largely because of this school (there isn't a huge number of decent secondaries near us).

Would you move now into the area where the good secondary is? We have had an absolute nightmare moving this time so I'm nervous that, if we stay local because we like the primary, we will struggle to find anything we like in time for secondary applications. Plus, it would mean moving for 5ish years.

Is it mad to be moving now into an area where there is a good secondary when we don't need it for so long?

What primary year is/are your DC in? Would you be commuting back to your current town for a number of years?

I was in a similar situation - I looked around local senior schools when my DC in year 4 to work out what we needed to do for seniors. Options were the local catchment school which was terrible, the "faith" school which was ok (required 3 years church attendance to get in which I was fine with but it wasn't a great school just "ok") and a couple of really good state schools where moving into the catchment area would cost an extra £200,000 on the mortgage. I also looked at private schools and worked out it was cheaper/better value for money to stay put in our less-posh area, and put the money into private school fees rather than ridiculous mortgage payments.

OP 5 years in advance seems like a long time - you may find the school changes. It seems unnecessarily cautious at this point.

@KihoBebiluPute I think your maths only works if your private school fees are t astronomical/only one child. Here in London we’d need £50k post tax for our 2 children. A larger house (which we can then sell at a later date to release equity for our children to have a house deposit) makes much more financial sense.

We did-moves when the eldest was in Year 1 actually so they had more chance to settle rather than leaving it-we had three by that point and couldn’t afford private for all and other than that it was the grammar or bust and we don’t want to put that much pressure on them. Best decision ever.

I would aim to move when the eldest was in Year 5 OP.

We were in a similar situation to you recently (I'm also a teacher), except our local secondary isn't in special measures or even RI. We just didn't want it for our child!

That should be starting Year 5. So end of Year 4 summer holidays kind of thing!

Private school fees cost us less than moving house, and that’s with 2 of them!

How will the children feel about moving?

We thought about doing a short term house but everyone, including family and husband, keep saying that it will harder to move the kids once they are older. So even if we move and keep them in their primary, they think it will be hard for them to live to secondary on their own when most of their primary friends will be moving up together.

That's why you should try to get them into a more koca primary from Year 5! Gives them 2 years to settle in and make new friends before moving up to secondary.

We moved for an outstanding secondary but the feeder secondary was listed as good. So we edged our bets really.

We moved when Ds1 was in year 3 but we moved to a cheaper area because the local primary there was "requires improvement" but we kept our children in the old outstanding primary. I was able to do the school run every day as I am a SAHM so could drive them a few miles. The house prices were just ridiculous in the old area and we needed an additional bedroom for Dh to be able to work from home.

I think it took just 6 years to go from RI to outstanding for the primary and the secondary school we moved for has remained outstanding, it hasn't been Ofsted inspected for years because the results are very high compared at a local and national level. I cannot fault the school it is truly amazing. So it worked for us.

We have moved house quite a few times for work.
DC have settled well each time, but it is disruptive and expensive.

If it was me, and as you say you are planning to move house now anyway, I would do it straight away and move to the new area now.

It's a different story if you could stay where you are for a few years longer, and just make the move later. I wouldn't ever choose two house moves when you could just do one.

We moved just before my eldest started year 5, for the same reasons as you. I certainly don't have any regrets. Moving at this point enabled our boys to settle and make friends locally. The school in question has been held in high regard for many, many years, so we were able to feel confident that it would most likely stay this way. My eldest got his secondary place and we are all extremely happy with the outcome so far. I kind of wish we'd done it earlier, but it took us a while to get our heads around moving further out of London!

It seems to be much harder to find a great secondary than a good primary, so I would always focus on the secondary.