In-Year School Admissions When You Move House

Everything below — the statutory Codes, the 30-school-day in-year appeal deadline, the exact priority given to looked after children — is England-specific. It comes from statutory guidance issued under English education legislation and applies to admission authorities in England only. Scotland runs a genuinely different system built around “placing requests” rather than an in-year admissions process with the same mechanics, set out in its own statutory guidance. Wales and Northern Ireland each run their own devolved arrangements too, with their own authorities, forms and timelines.

The underlying advice — apply the moment your move is confirmed, don’t assume anything carries over automatically, ask the receiving authority directly rather than guessing — holds everywhere in the UK. But the specific rules, deadlines and appeal rights described on this page are England’s, and shouldn’t be treated as UK-wide.

Most school places in England are allocated through the normal admissions round — a single national timetable with fixed deadlines each autumn, culminating in national offer day the following spring. An in-year application is anything outside that: formally, one made on or after the first day of the first term of the admission year, or for an age group that isn’t a standard entry point. In practice, that’s almost every application driven by a house move, because moves rarely land neatly on the one date a year the normal round is designed around.

The practical consequence: there’s no fixed deadline to aim for and no single national offer day to wait on. You can apply at any time once you know your move is happening, and the process is designed to be worked through on a rolling basis, application by application, rather than in one big annual batch.

This is the single most commonly misunderstood point in the whole process, and worth stating precisely: for most state schools, you don’t apply to the school itself, and you don’t apply through your old council either — you apply through the local council covering the address you’re moving to. That council can tell you which schools locally have places available and will run you through its own application process, which varies from one authority to the next.

A council is only required to coordinate in-year applications for the schools where it’s itself the admission authority — many community and voluntary controlled schools. Some schools, including most academies, faith schools and voluntary aided schools, are their own admission authority and can run their own in-year process, though a council will often still coordinate on their behalf where the school agrees. Either way, starting with your new council is the right first move — they’ll point you to whichever process actually applies for a specific school.

This is the timing detail worth building a moving plan around. Under the statutory School Admissions Code, once an in-year application is actually submitted, the admission authority should aim to notify you of the outcome within 10 school days, and is required to do so within 15 school days at the latest. None of that begins until the form is in — not when you first start looking at schools, and not once you’ve physically moved in. Waiting until moving day to apply doesn’t just delay the decision by however many days you waited; for a school with limited spare capacity, it can be the difference between a place being available at all and finding out it filled while you were still waiting to move.

Many local authorities will accept an in-year application before you’ve actually moved, once you have a confirmed address and a realistic move date — it’s worth asking your new council directly whether they’ll take yours early, rather than assuming you have to wait until you’re living there.

1. 1

   Move date confirmed

   The earliest sensible point to apply — some councils accept an in-year application ahead of the actual move if you have a confirmed address.

2. 2

   Application submitted

   This is what actually starts the clock — not the date you moved in, and not the date you started researching schools.

3. 3

   Aim: 10 school days

   The Code's expectation for how quickly the admission authority should aim to tell you the outcome.

4. 4

   Deadline: 15 school days

   The hard requirement — you must be notified in writing by this point, one way or the other.

5. 5

   If refused: right to appeal

   The refusal must state the reason and your right to appeal — see below for the timeline that follows.

There’s a common assumption that “catchment area” works the same way everywhere, on some fixed national formula. It doesn’t. The Code requires only that each admission authority sets its own oversubscription criteria — the rules used to decide who gets a place when there are more applicants than spaces — and that whatever it chooses is applied consistently and explained clearly. Distance from home to school, and any catchment or “designated area”, is one of the most common criteria, but it’s set and defined by each individual authority, and sometimes by each individual school acting as its own admission authority.

Because of this, two councils a short distance apart — or even two schools within the same council — can genuinely run different systems: one measuring distance in a straight line, another by walking route; one drawing a catchment map, another using none at all and ranking purely by distance on the day. Don’t assume whatever applied to your old address applies at your new one — check your new council’s published admission arrangements for the specific schools you’re interested in.

Oversubscription criteria vary locally, as above, but a few things are fixed nationally and worth knowing regardless of which council you’re dealing with.

Looked after and previously looked after children sit above every other criterion. This isn’t just common local practice — it’s a statutory rule that applies everywhere in England:

Separately, a child with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan that names a specific school has an even more direct route in: the Code states plainly that all children whose EHC plan names the school must be admitted — this sits outside the ordinary oversubscription process entirely, and works through the EHC plan process itself rather than a standard in-year application.

Siblings already at a school are a very common priority criterion too, but — unlike the two points above — not a guaranteed, nationally fixed one. The Code doesn’t define “sibling” itself; it requires each admission authority to state clearly in its own arrangements exactly what it means by the term, including whether step-siblings, foster siblings or other children living permanently at the same address count. A definition that includes a step-sibling at one school may not at the one next door.

If your preferred or zoned school has no places, you can be added to its waiting list — but it’s worth understanding exactly how that list works, because it doesn’t behave the way a lot of people assume. Applying early doesn’t lock in an earlier position on the list itself:

In other words, the waiting list is re-ranked by the school’s published oversubscription criteria — distance, siblings, looked after status and so on — every time a child is added, not simply in the order applications arrived. Being first to apply doesn’t guarantee being first on the list. What applying early does still change is everything upstream of the list: how soon you get a decision at all, how much runway you have if that decision is a refusal, and how many other schools you still have time to consider before term starts.

If your application is refused, you have a statutory right to appeal to an independent appeal panel — a panel that is genuinely separate from the school and the admission authority, and whose job is specifically to check whether the admission arrangements were correctly applied in your case, not to re-decide who’s the “best” candidate for the place.

That 30-school-day figure is specific to in-year admissions — a deliberately faster path than the normal round, in recognition that a family moving house mid-year can’t realistically wait months for a resolution the way an application decided the previous spring can. Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 classes also carry an extra wrinkle worth knowing about: infant class size limits (normally 30 per class) mean a panel can only overturn a refusal there in narrower, specifically defined circumstances than at other year groups, even where the panel agrees the process wasn’t applied perfectly.

Pulling the above into a sequence worth following: