The schools are the best argument for Andover, which is not what people expect from a town whose main road is a bypass. Roughly nine in ten graded settings across the county come out good or better. Twenty-seven of them hold Outstanding. The town's oldest secondary has been teaching in some form since Elizabeth I was handing out charters. Whatever else needs defending here, this part does not.
Ofsted's published grades for Hampshire, the county authority Andover sits inside, cover 211 settings with an overall grade, and 185 of those are good or better. Twenty-seven are Outstanding, 16 require improvement and 10 are rated inadequate. That spread matters more than the headline: a strong county average is not a guarantee at street level, and the gap between the best and worst in the same authority is wide enough to be worth an afternoon of reading. A further 226 settings carry no published overall grade at all, which makes them unrated rather than suspect, and they are not evidence in either direction.
Worth saying plainly, because it catches people every year: naming a school is not the same as being offered a place at it. Admissions are run by the county, not by the estate agent who mentioned the school in the listing, and the well-regarded ones fill. Anyone buying on the assumption that the closest school is the certain school finds out in the spring, at which point the house purchase has already completed.
Secondary provision in the town is led by John Hanson Community School, the oldest in the town and the direct descendant of its sixteenth-century grammar school, which took its current name and site in the 1970s, and Harrow Way Community School. Between them they take most of the town's secondary intake, and both are close enough to the estates that the walk is a genuine option rather than a claim. Andover Church of England Primary School carries the town's name, and for families wanting to leave the state system there is Rookwood School, an independent day and boarding school taking pupils from age three to eighteen, and Farleigh School, a Catholic preparatory school outside the town. Post-sixteen study is concentrated in a single college in Andover, so the sixth-form decision is less a choice than a location.
The rest divides into two useful groups. Several of the town's primaries run as paired infant and junior schools on the same footprint, which means one more transition at seven than parents arriving from single-school areas are braced for, and it is worth checking which pairing your address feeds before you fall in love with the kitchen. Beyond the built-up edge, the surrounding parishes each keep a small Church of England primary, which is the reason a village three miles out can cost more than a newer house closer in, and the reason those schools are the first thing people ask about when a house comes up in one of them. Andover also holds a cluster of special and alternative provision serving a wide area, which is more than a town this size usually manages.
Schools are the dimension where Andover comfortably outperforms its own reputation, and the only real work left for a buyer is checking the specific grade of the specific school rather than trusting the county picture to hold on their street.