Good, and in this corner of Surrey that is close to the baseline. More than nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. Thirty are outstanding. The nearest primary is roughly a nine-minute walk from the typical home. The schools are easy to find. Getting a place is the harder part.
Surrey has 159 schools with a published Ofsted grade, and 147 of them are rated good or outstanding. That is more than nine in ten. Thirty hold the top grade of outstanding. Seven are rated requires improvement and five inadequate, so a weak school is rare across the county but does exist. Another 194 settings in the authority have no published grade yet, and their absence from the count says nothing about how good they are. All of these figures cover the whole of Surrey and say nothing about the schools nearest to Ashford Common.
The primaries on the local list include Ashford Park Primary School, Springfield Primary School and St Michael Catholic Primary School & Nursery. Surrey County Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so living round the corner from one of them does not secure a place. Faith schools usually add criteria of their own, and those can count for more than distance. On the secondary side, Thomas Knyvett College and Thamesmead School are both within reach, along with St Paul's Catholic College. Read each school's oversubscription criteria and its last few years of allocation distances before an offer goes in on a house. Because good schools are so common across the county, the real competition is over how close you live to them.
Distance changes at eleven. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about a nine-minute walk or a seven-minute drive from the average home here. The nearest secondary is about a 30-minute walk, 20 minutes by public transport or 11 minutes by car. The public-transport times are the most likely to have aged since then. Half the commuters here drive to work, so the morning school run at secondary age tends to happen by car.
One nearby school that some older guides still mention has since closed. Check any shortlist against the current register.
Schools are one of Ashford Common's clear strengths. The local choice is good across the board, and the hard part is getting a place under the admissions rules.