The schools are the easiest part of the case for moving to Ashford. About nine in ten graded schools across Kent are good or better. The town has two grammar schools and an old one that has changed its name more often than its address. For most homes, the nearest primary is a short walk away. Getting a place is the hard part.
Ofsted has graded 245 schools and other education settings across Kent, and 221 of them are good or outstanding. That is roughly nine in ten. Of the rest, 38 are outstanding, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. These are county-wide counts for Kent, not a tally of Ashford's own schools, so they describe the system your children will be applying into rather than the school at the end of your road. Another 255 settings have no published grade yet. They haven't failed anything; they simply haven't been graded.
Distance is on your side. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times from 2019 put the nearest primary about a ten-minute walk away on average. The nearest secondary is about a 24-minute walk, 19 minutes by public transport or 10 minutes by car. At primary age, most families can walk. By secondary, a teenager can manage it alone, which suits both sides.
No school name guarantees a place, and nobody should buy a house on the strength of one. Admission depends on the rules of the school and the year you apply, and grammar schools select by test whatever your postcode says. Parents who pay extra for a house near a grammar school gate sometimes learn that the test doesn't care where they live. Check the admission criteria for the specific school and the specific year before you sign anything.
A handful of names tell you what kind of town this is. The Norton Knatchbull School started around 1630 as a free grammar school next to the church, went simply by the town's name until 1980, and now sits on Hythe Road. Highworth Grammar School is its counterpart for girls on Maidstone Road. The John Wallis Church of England Academy is named after the mathematician born in Ashford in 1616, who left as a boy to escape the plague and went on to Cambridge. Chilmington Green School belongs to the big new housing development of the same name, and a school going up before most of the houses tells you who the builders expect to move in. Ashford School on East Hill is the fee-paying option. It took only girls for most of its history and began admitting boys in 2006.
The rest are village and suburban primaries, many of them Church of England. Brook, Challock, Great Chart, Mersham and Kingsnorth each have their own, and the newer estates such as Finberry and Repton Manor got schools early rather than as an afterthought.
The schools are one of Ashford's real strengths, provided you read the admission rules as closely as you read the house survey.