Changing my sons school

Hi,

I’m looking for advice on where I stand with changing my 9 year old sons school.

I live 35miles away from my son’s father and have done for over a year. During this time to keep my son’s father happy, he has stayed in his father’s local school, he also plays for the local rugby team. This means I do a 140 mile round trip twice a week and 70 miles twice a week. His father has him after school on a Wednesday to a Saturday morning.

I’ve recently found out I’m pregnant and we are over the moon. My son is very excited to become a big brother as he’s been asking for years to have a sibling. Due to this, it is not going to be feasible any longer for me to continue doing this. Not only does it cost me over £300 per month but this with a newborn is going to be extremely difficult not to mention when my other child starts school, this will make it impossible. He has accused me already of putting my unborn child above my son but this is the only way I can see going forward to keep it fair.

I’ve mentioned changing my Sons school to his father and he has (as usual) taken this badly, where he has said “I’ll just kill myself so you can do what you want”. This is not the first, nor will it be the last time he has tried to manipulate me with this threat. When we were together, he would regularly say this when he didn’t get his own way. My sons doctors is registered at his fathers and his father claims the CHB for him because I’m on a substantially higher wage and he was struggling to afford youth costs, normal day to day costs with our son etc.

There is a school local to me which would mean I don’t have to do all this driving, my son would make friends in the area, he’d not have to get up stupidly early in the mornings to go to school and he’d have more free time. Yes, my son’s father’s days with him would inevitably change because he will not bring him down here to school, even if it was once a week but I have said to counter the one evening/night loss per week, he could have him extra in school holidays etc. I have also on multiple occasions told him I don’t need or want his money in the form of maintenance as I don’t need it because he kept saying he was “surprised” I didn’t try and get some.

The area we live in now is very middle class, low to no crime and honestly such a safe and quiet area. The area we moved from is a high crime area which I lived in all my life. One of the many reasons I decided to leave was due to 2 murders taking place in one weekend within 5 minutes walk from my house.

My gut feeling is my son’s father is either going to do something to himself to try and force me to comply or he is going to go and try to get a prohibited steps order.

Has anyone had this done to them? Had any experience with doing something like this? I don’t know what next steps would be but guess I need to speak to a solicitor asap and get a specific order but I don’t know the process for this, neither do I know if I even have a case to win this. If someone can provide some advice, I would be eternally grateful.

Thank you.