Good, and the worry is getting in, not what you find when you do. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The town has two state secondaries of its own. One of them was founded as a grammar school the year before the Civil War reached Alton. Choosing matters less here than the admissions letter.
Ofsted has graded 211 schools and settings across the Hampshire local authority, and 185 of them are good or outstanding: close to nine in every ten. Of the rest, 27 hold the top grade, 16 are rated requires improvement and 10 inadequate. These are county-wide counts, covering the whole local authority rather than Alton alone, so they tell you about the system your child enters, not the building at the end of your road. Another 226 settings have no published grade yet. That means nobody has graded them, not that anything is wrong with them, and they are left out of the sums.
A school's name on a map guarantees nothing. Hampshire allocates places by its own admissions rules, and living near a school is not the same as being offered one. The parent who buys the house first and reads the admissions policy second is a well-known type, and a spring allocation letter tends to cure them. Check the current rules for any school you are counting on before an offer goes in, and preferably before you fall in love with the kitchen.
For secondary education the town has two choices. Eggar's School began in 1642 as a free grammar school, founded by John Eggar, and moved from Anstey Road to Holybourne in 1968. It became an academy in 2012, which is how schools now describe changing the letterhead and the chain of command. Amery Hill School is the other state secondary in the town, so most local families are choosing between two rather than shopping around a dozen.
At primary level the town is split into infant and junior schools, as older Hampshire towns tend to be. Alton Infant School and Anstey Junior School are among them, and The Butts Primary School shares its name with one of the town's conservation areas. The two-school model gives parents a second admissions round partway through primary, which nobody ever asks for. Church of England primaries fill the surrounding villages, so the rural end of the patch has options of its own.
Holybourne is also home to Treloar School and Treloar College, founded in 1907 by Sir William Purdie Treloar, a former Lord Mayor of London, to educate young people with physical disabilities. They now take pupils from 2 to 25 with physical and learning difficulties. Most towns can't point to specialist provision of that depth on their own doorstep.
Schools are one of Alton's real strengths, and the effort goes into securing a place rather than hunting for a decent school.