Good, and the village has its own, which is more than a lot of places this size can say. The primary sits inside Alderholt rather than down a B road somewhere. Maths results in the area come in above the national benchmark. Almost eight in ten graded settings across the county are good or better. The catch arrives at eleven, when the school run stops being a walk and becomes a commute.
Saint James' Church of England First School and Nursery carries the village name and is the one primary in the area on the Department for Education's Key Stage 2 measure. Maths averaged 106 in that measure, against a national benchmark of 100. That is a solid result rather than a spectacular one, and with a single school behind it, one strong or weak cohort moves the number more than it would in a town with six primaries. Journey times back it up: the modelled run to a primary is around eight minutes by car, roughly 15 on foot, and about 11 by public transport. For a village three miles from Fordingbridge, a walkable primary is the single most valuable thing on this page.
The wider picture comes from Ofsted, which has published grades for 86 settings across Dorset. Sixty-eight of those are good or outstanding, which is roughly four in five, with two rated outstanding, 17 requiring improvement and one inadequate. A further 52 settings hold no published grade yet and are neither good nor bad news. Those counts cover the whole of Dorset rather than Alderholt itself, so they describe the quality of the pool a family here is choosing from, not the quality of any particular school gate.
Secondary means leaving the village. The Burgate School and Sixth Form in Fordingbridge is the nearest, and the Department for Transport's modelling puts it at about 19 minutes by car, roughly 45 by public transport and around 91 on foot. Nobody walks 91 minutes to a lesson, which means the secondary years here run on a car, a bus pass, or a parent who has rearranged their working day around a timetable. Families who move to Alderholt for the primary and think about the secondary later tend to have that conversation once, loudly, in the summer their eldest turns ten.
Beyond the village, the choice widens without getting much closer. Western Downland Church of England Aided Primary School and Hale Primary School sit out in the surrounding parishes, with the Fordingbridge infant and junior schools and Breamore Church of England Primary School making up the rest of the practical options, plus Forres Sandle Manor in the independent sector for anyone paying. The pattern is small rural primaries scattered across a wide area rather than a cluster of choices within a mile.
Worth saying plainly: none of these names is a guarantee of a place. Admission is decided by the local authority's oversubscription rules, and a school being nearby is not the same as a school being available. Church schools apply their own faith criteria on top. Anyone buying on the strength of a particular school should check that year's admissions arrangements and the actual distance cut-off from the address they are considering, not from the village centre, before they exchange.
Schools are among the strongest arguments for Alderholt. A walkable primary with above-benchmark maths, inside a county where most graded settings are good or better, is a genuinely good starting hand, and the only real cost is the drive that starts at secondary.