Secondary school admission and house move disaster!

[SaffyWall]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had any experience or advice about secondary school admissions and moving house.

DS is in Yr6 and I've applied for his secondary school place as normal. We currently live just (0.2 miles) outside the catchment of our preferred school as I'm fairly certain he'll get a place there based on what's happened in previous years.

Last October we bought a house in catchment and thought we'd be moving in next week (so, well before the school places are allocated) but there's a big problem with some of the building regs certificates on the new house and it's going to take some weeks to sort out. One scenario we're considering is continuing with the sale of our current house and finding somewhere temporary to live until we can sort our onward purchase. My only problem with this idea is that this might affect DS's school application as the temporary home will not be in catchment and we won't own the home that's on his actual school appliation on 1st March, or our new 'in catchment' home.

I'm going to ring the Admissions Department tomorrow, but wondered if anyone had any advice or experience about this sort of situation.

Thank you.

You need to talk to them and get their decision in writing, ideally.

Most will continue to use the address at the time of application; most also have a late date for address change with good reason, maybe mid Feb, but it sounds like you won't make that for your purchase. What you need is assurance that they will still use the current address for allocations, even if you have a new address for correspondence.

Will you have exchanged on the new property within the next week or so? Some LAS will take exchange as proof of address.

Actually for secondary the address change date was probably mid Dec.

What they should do is use the address you applied under, but the new address would probably be used for waiting lists if you have moved by allocations day.

If you have applied already from your current address and you will be in the new permanent address by the time he actually starts school in September will they even need to know or care that you stay somewhere temporarily in the interim?

Thank you both. I'm sure I'm worrying about a problem that might never arise, but this whole move has been so difficult and this most recent delay might be the thing to tip me over the edge! There's a slim chance that we'll exchange in the next fortnight but that depends on so many stars aligning that I can't really believe it will happen.

hazelnutlatte - I did wonder about just keeping schtum about the whole thing as we will definitely be living in catchment by September (even if this move falls through and we end up renting) but my eldest child is at the school so I think that might lead to some complications as they won't have the correct contact details for them??

If he would have got a place from your current address last year, which was the peak of the birth rate, you should be fine. Good luck.

If your eldest is already at the school won’t your younger child qualify through a sibling link rather than on distance, assuming it is a higher priority (it usually is in my experience) or does the sibling link not count if they are due to leave the school before younger sibling joins?

Secondaries often don't have sibling criteria , as the assumption is by then they can get themselves to school.

His sibling is in Yr11 so unfortunately that doesn't count in this case.

I'm fairly certain that he'll get a spot at our preferred school, but I don't want to then jepordise that by not having an address in the area, albeit temporarily. I'll ring the admissions office tomorrow and hopefully they'll be able to talk me through things - we can't be the only people who've been in this situation.

Frustratingly it's the council planning department's cock up that means we can't move in to the house as planned next week!