Reception to A-levels. What changes at each school stage, when a mid-year transfer is fine, and how school places actually get allocated.
When you are moving house with school age children, the question that matters is not really which month the lorry arrives. It is how old your children are and what year group they are in. A four-year-old in reception and a sixteen-year-old three months from GCSEs are two completely different moves, and the date that suits one can be the worst possible date for the other. This guide walks the decision stage by stage, from infants through to sixth form.
We survey family homes across Sussex, Surrey and Kent every week, and the conversations that go wrong almost always go wrong for the same reason: the family fixed a completion date first and looked at the school position second. Doing it the other way round costs nothing and removes most of the stress. For the seasonal picture — which break is easiest to work around — our guide to moving during school holidays covers each window, and the peak-season booking and cost guide covers what those dates do to your quote.
Between nursery and the end of Year 1, a move is about as low-friction as it will ever be. There is no syllabus to interrupt, attendance is not being tracked against exam entry, and friendships at that age re-form in a fortnight. If you have a choice of dates, this is the stage where you should ignore the school calendar entirely and pick whatever is cheapest and least crowded.
The one thing that does matter at this stage is the reception intake itself. A child born between 1 September and 31 August starts reception in the September after their fourth birthday, and the national offer day for those places falls in mid-April. If your move completes before the application deadline in mid-January, you apply through the local authority you are moving to and give the new address. If it completes after offers have gone out, you have a place at a school you may no longer live near, and you join the in-year process instead.
Practically, that means a family with a pre-schooler and a move pencilled in for spring should either get the paperwork in before mid-January using the new address (with evidence — exchanged contracts or a signed tenancy usually satisfies an admissions team), or accept that the first term may be at a school further away than they would like. Neither is a disaster. It is just much easier to decide in October than in April.
For the physical move, small children are the easiest passengers and the hardest packers. Keep one carton per child sealed and labelled for their own things, and open it first at the other end. Our moving house with children guide covers the move-day mechanics; this page is about the school decision behind it.
The middle of primary school is the second-best window. Children in Years 2 to 5 are old enough to understand what is happening and young enough that the classroom routine, rather than the friendship group, is what anchors them. Most primary schools handle in-year arrivals well: a designated buddy, a settling-in visit before the first proper day, and a phone call home at the end of week one.
What we see go wrong here is not the child, it is the paperwork. Ask the current school in writing for the pupil’s records — termly reports, attendance, phonics and reading levels, and anything held by the SENCo — before you hand back the keys, not after. Records move between schools on request, but the request has to come from the receiving school, and that only happens once the child is formally on roll. If the two schools are in different local authorities, allow longer.
Where a child has an Education, Health and Care plan, the position changes completely and you should start much earlier. The plan names a specific school, and naming a new one is a formal amendment by the local authority rather than an ordinary admissions decision. That process runs to statutory timescales, not to your completion date. Families in this position should speak to the SEN team in the receiving authority as soon as an offer is accepted on the house.
One genuinely underrated point: a move within the same authority in Years 2 to 5 often does not require a school change at all. Plenty of families we move across Eastbourne or between Lewes and the surrounding villages simply keep the existing school and absorb a longer run in the morning for a year or two. If the new commute is under twenty minutes and the child is settled, that is usually the better answer.
Year 6 is the single trickiest primary year to move in, because the secondary transfer application runs right through it. The national closing date for secondary applications is 31 October in Year 6, and national offer day is 1 March. A family that moves in November has applied from an address they no longer live at; a family that moves in April has an offer for a school on the wrong side of the county.
The rule of thumb we give families is simple. If you can complete before late October, apply from the new address and the whole thing resolves itself. If you cannot complete until after March, apply from your current address, accept the offer you are given so you have something in hand, and then apply in-year to the schools you actually want near the new house. Accepting an offer does not stop you applying elsewhere, and turning one down before you have a replacement is how children end up without a place in September.
The middle case — completion somewhere between November and February — is the awkward one. Local authorities will usually take a late change of address and reconsider your application if you can evidence the move, but they are not obliged to, and the further past the deadline you are the more likely you are to be treated as a late applicant and dealt with after everyone else. If your chain looks like it will land in that window, tell the admissions team early rather than waiting for exchange.
Sussex admissions practice is not uniform, either. East Sussex works largely on straight-line distance from home to school, so a move of a mile can change everything. Brighton & Hove has historically used catchment areas with a ballot where a catchment is oversubscribed, which means distance matters less and which side of a boundary line you sit on matters more. Our Eastbourne schools guide covers the local picture, and the Brighton area guide covers the city.
Once a child is through the Year 7 door, the first three years of secondary are more forgiving than parents expect. Nothing is being examined, sets can be adjusted, and a new arrival in a year group of two hundred is far less conspicuous than a new arrival in a class of thirty. We move families mid-year at this stage regularly and the children generally land better than the parents did.
Two practical things make the difference. First, subject option choices usually happen in the spring of Year 8 or Year 9, and different schools offer different subjects. If your child has chosen options that the new school does not run, that has to be sorted before they start, not in week two. Ring the new school’s head of year and ask them to map the choices across.
Second, modern foreign languages are the classic mismatch. A child two years into Spanish arriving at a school that teaches French from Year 7 will need a plan. Good schools deal with this — a supported catch-up group, or sitting the language they already have — but only if you flag it before the first day.
The social side is the bit families worry about and the bit that is most fixable. Ask about the buddy system, ask whether there is a lunchtime club your child would join in the first week, and get them into one out-of-school activity locally before term starts. A child who already knows three faces from a Saturday football side walks in on a completely different footing.
This is the stage where we tell families to move the date rather than the child, if they possibly can. GCSE courses are two years long, coursework and non-examined assessment start early in Year 10, and exam entries are made by the school the candidate is registered at. Changing school partway through is not impossible, but it is genuinely disruptive in a way that changing in Year 8 is not.
The specific problems are concrete. Different schools sit different exam boards for the same subject, so a child who has done a year of one board’s history specification may have covered periods the new school will not examine. Coursework and NEA marks travel with the candidate but the new school has to be willing to take them on and authenticate them. Practical science endorsements, art portfolios and DT projects are all part-built in the old school’s workshop. And some subjects — a minority language, a niche technical option — may simply not be available at the new school at all.
If the move is unavoidable, the order of operations is: secure the school place first, then ask the head of year for a subject-by-subject board comparison, then set the completion date around what you learn. Schools will usually do this quickly if you ask politely and specifically. Christmas of Year 10 is the least bad point; the spring of Year 11 is the worst, and if you are within a term of the exams it is worth asking whether one parent and the candidate can stay put until the papers are done.
In practice, a fair number of the families we move at this stage split the job: the household goes to the new house and a proportion of the contents goes into storage in Sussex for a few months while the exam year finishes. That is a normal request and it is easier to price at survey stage than to arrange in a panic three weeks out.
Sixth form is the stage where the honest advice is often that the young person does not move at all. A-level specifications vary more between boards than GCSEs do, sixth forms have their own entry requirements and their own subject combinations, and a student who arrives in the January of Year 13 has a very hard six months in front of them.
Between Year 12 and Year 13 — that is, over the summer — a move is manageable if the new sixth form runs the same subjects on compatible boards and has capacity. Sixth-form places are not part of the local authority coordinated process; you apply directly to the school or college, and popular ones fill early. Start the conversation in the spring, not in August.
Mid Year 13 is a different matter. UCAS references are written by the school that knows the student, predicted grades have already gone in, and moving after applications are submitted means a new school inheriting a prediction it did not make. Where the family move is unavoidable, the options worth exploring are a weekly boarding place, staying with relatives near the old school for two terms, or simply commuting for the remainder of the year if the distance allows. Plenty of families we move from London out to the coast do exactly that — the parents relocate, the eighteen-year-old finishes the year on the train. The London to Sussex guide covers the wider relocation picture that usually sits behind these decisions.
If the student is heading to university anyway, remember that the family move and the student move are two separate jobs a few months apart. We handle both, and the student move advice for parents covers the second one.
This is the question almost every family asks us, and the answer depends far more on year group than on temperament. Broadly: below Year 6, a mid-year transfer is a non-event and waiting for September rarely buys anything. In Year 6 and again in Year 11, September is worth waiting for. In Years 7 to 9, either works. In Year 13, neither is good and you should look at the alternatives above.
There is a second consideration that cuts the other way, though, and it is the one parents underestimate. A child who starts in September starts alongside a cohort of new arrivals in Year 7, which is ideal — but in any other year group, September arrivals join a class that has already been together for a year or more, exactly like a January arrival would. The supposed advantage of the clean start only really exists at the natural transition points: reception, Year 7, and Year 12.
Outside those points, a mid-year arrival can actually be easier. Schools notice a single new child in November and put effort into them. A child arriving in the first week of September, when the school is dealing with a whole new intake, timetable clashes and staff changes, can get less attention rather than more. We have had more than one parent tell us afterwards that the February move they dreaded went better than the August move they had planned.
The practical middle path, if your dates allow it, is to move in the last fortnight of a holiday rather than at the very start of one. The house gets sorted, the child gets a few days of routine at the new address before term begins, and you have not spent six weeks living out of cartons. The house move preparation guide covers the run-up that makes that work.
It helps enormously to understand the machinery, because most of the anxiety around moving house with school age children comes from not knowing how the decision gets made. There are two entirely separate systems and families frequently apply through the wrong one.
The first is the coordinated admissions round. It runs once a year for the normal points of entry — reception, and Year 7 for secondary transfer — with the deadlines described above. You list preferences in order, every school you name considers you against its published oversubscription criteria, and if more than one would offer, you get the highest-ranked one. Ranking a school lower does not make you less likely to get it; the system is designed so that you can be honest about order.
The second is in-year admission, and it covers everything else: a Year 4 child moving in March, a Year 9 child moving in October, anyone arriving outside the annual round. Here you apply either to the local authority or directly to the school, depending on the school’s status, and a place is offered if there is one in that year group. There is no ranking and no offer day. It is first come, first considered, against whatever space exists.
The criteria that decide a contested place are published by each school and are more mechanical than people assume. Looked-after children come first by law. Then, typically, medical or social need with professional evidence, then siblings already at the school, then distance — measured either in a straight line or by shortest walking route, which can produce very different answers on the same street. Faith schools add their own criteria. Grammar schools test first and apply the criteria to those who qualify.
Two things follow from that. One: your address on the closing date is the address that counts, which is why exchange timing matters more than completion timing. Two: distance tie-breaks make a small move significant. If you are choosing between two houses a mile apart in the Eastbourne area or the villages around rural East Sussex, check the previous year’s furthest-offered distance for the school you care about before you offer on either.
Sometimes there is no place at the school you wanted, and it is worth knowing that this is a normal situation with a normal process rather than a dead end. Every maintained school keeps a waiting list, ordered by the same oversubscription criteria — not by the date you joined it. Someone who moves into the area next month can go above you, which feels unfair and is simply how the rules work. Stay on the list; movement over the first term is common as other families settle their own arrangements.
You also have a statutory right of appeal for any place refused, heard by an independent panel. For most year groups the panel weighs the difficulty caused to your child against the difficulty caused to the school by taking another pupil. For infant classes — reception, Year 1 and Year 2 — class-size law makes appeals much harder to win, and they generally succeed only where a mistake was made or the decision was unreasonable. Prepare for an appeal with documents rather than feelings: travel times, medical letters, anything specific about your child and that school.
In the meantime your child is entitled to a school place somewhere, and the local authority has to find one. Take it. A term at a second-choice school while you sit on a waiting list is a far better position than no place at all, and it does not weaken your case.
The move itself is the one part of all this you can control the date of. If the school position is still unresolved when your completion date arrives, that is an argument for keeping the move simple: full packing, one clean day, everything unpacked by the weekend. Our full packing service exists precisely for the weeks when the family has bigger things to think about, and the questions to ask a removals company covers what to confirm before you book.
We've been a family-run Sussex remover — the same name on the lorry as the name on the paperwork. Mark personally surveys the high-value and overseas moves; our crews are directly employed (not casual day labour) and trained at our own staff training centre, one of only a handful of UK removers with that facility on site.
Standard inclusions on every full removal: pad-wrap protection for every freestanding piece of furniture, removal-grade cartons, a written and itemised fixed-price quote with no surprises on the day, and the British Association of Removers' Advance Payment Guarantee protecting every deposit. The result, over the years and hundreds of moves, is a 4.9/5 review average across 120+ independent Google reviews.
Booking the survey takes ten minutes. Whether it's a one-bedroom flat across Eastbourne or a country house to overseas, the process is the same: in-home or video survey, written quote within 48 hours, deposit-protected booking, and a calm move day.
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If you take nothing else from this: nursery to Year 5, move whenever suits the household and the budget. Year 6, get the secondary application in from the address you will actually be living at, and if that is not possible, accept whatever offer you are given and work the in-year list afterwards. Years 7 to 9, a mid-year transfer is fine — check subject options and languages before the first day. Years 10 and 11, hold the date if you can, and if you cannot, get a board-by-board subject comparison from the new school before you commit. Year 12 to 13, look hard at whether the student needs to move at all.
Everything else — the packing, the lorry, the day itself — is our problem rather than yours, and it is the easy half. The school question is the one that needs to be answered first, because it is the one that sets the date. If you are still choosing between areas, the East Sussex areas guide is a sensible next read, and the Hastings area guide covers the eastern end of the county.
For your specific move, the free survey takes ten minutes and we’ll come back within 48 hours with an honest plan that fits your dates. If the school position is still moving, say so at survey — we would rather build flexibility in than re-quote later. Our Sussex crews move family homes every week of the year.
Independent schools sit outside the local authority admissions process entirely. You apply directly, entry points are commonly 4+, 7+, 11+ and 13+, assessment and registration can run a year or more ahead, and deposits are usually non-refundable. That changes the sequencing: for an independent-school family the school decision often has to be made before the house is even on the market, because a registration deadline can sit eighteen months before the child would start.
Notice periods are the other difference and the one that costs money. Most independent schools require a full term’s written notice, and leaving without it means paying the term’s fees anyway. If you are contemplating a move, read the terms and conditions you signed before you set a completion date, not after. A move that slips by two weeks over a notice deadline can be an expensive fortnight.
Where a family has one child in the state sector and one independent, the two calendars rarely line up — independent terms usually start later and finish earlier, and the breaks are longer. In that situation the binding constraint is whichever child is at the more sensitive stage, and everything else works around them. It is worth writing both schools’ term dates on one sheet before you agree anything with a solicitor. For the practical family-side logistics on the day, the moving with children guide covers it, and the moving with pets guide covers the other member of the household everyone forgets.
Anywhere from nursery to Year 5 is straightforward, and Year 7 entry is the cleanest secondary transition because the whole year group is new. Year 6 and Year 11 are the two years to avoid if you have any choice, because the secondary application and the GCSE exam series both sit inside them.
Yes. Admissions teams will usually consider the new address once you can evidence it — exchanged contracts, a completion statement or a signed tenancy agreement. What they will not normally accept is an address you intend to have. Get the evidence in before the closing date, because the address held on the deadline is the one used.
Much less than parents expect below Year 10. A single new arrival in November gets more attention from a school than one of two hundred arrivals in September. The exceptions are exam years, where coursework, exam boards and subject availability create real problems rather than social ones.
The receiving school requests the common transfer file from the previous school once the child is on roll. Ask the old school in writing for copies of reports, attendance and any SEN paperwork before you leave, so you are not dependent on that transfer landing quickly — across local authority boundaries it can take a few weeks.
Considerably. The plan names a specific school and changing it is a formal amendment by the local authority, not an ordinary admissions decision, so it runs to statutory timescales rather than your completion date. Contact the SEN team in the authority you are moving to as soon as your offer on the house is accepted.
Accept the place you were offered so your child definitely has one, join the waiting list for the school you want, and lodge an appeal. Waiting lists are ranked by the school’s oversubscription criteria rather than by how long you have been waiting, and places do come up through the first term as other families settle their arrangements.