Good, and the county's inspection record backs that up. More than nine in ten graded schools are good or outstanding. The nearest primary is about a ten-minute walk. The secondary is twice that on foot. Ashford's parents have less to panic about than the school-gate chat suggests.
Across Surrey, the county Ashford's schools are inspected under, Ofsted has graded 147 of 159 settings good or outstanding, which is better than nine in ten. Thirty of them are outstanding. Seven require improvement and five are inadequate, so the county has some weak spots, just few of them. Another 194 settings in Surrey have no published grade yet, mostly because they are new or awaiting a first inspection, and they sit outside those counts. It is a county figure, and it says nothing about which of those 159 your child would get.
That depends on Surrey County Council, which allocates places by its published admissions rules: siblings, faith criteria for the church schools, and distance measured the way the council measures it. Buying a house near a school's railings gives you a better chance of a place there and nothing more. Look up last year's offer distances for the schools you care about on the council's admissions pages, because the furthest child offered a place tells you more than any map. "Walking distance to schools" in the particulars has never got a child into one.
For primaries, Ashford has a decent spread close to home. Ashford CofE Primary School and Ashford Park Primary School carry the town's name, and Town Farm Primary School & Nursery and Clarendon Primary School cover more of it. The Echelford Primary School is named after Echelford, what Ashford was called in the early medieval period, which makes it about the only thing in town that remembers anything before the post-war semis. The Department for Transport modelled the typical walk to the nearest primary at about ten minutes in 2019, or about seven minutes by car, so most of the school run can be done without starting the engine.
The secondary is Thomas Knyvett College. The Department for Transport put the walk to the nearest secondary at about 20 minutes in 2019, about 15 by public transport and 9 by car, and those public transport times have had years to go out of date. The college shares its name with the 17th-century benefactor whose schoolhouse, Lord Knyvett's, is now a scheduled monument, so the Knyvett name has outlasted most things in Ashford. A further education college moved its Ashford campus into a new building next to Thomas Knyvett College in 2016, so sixth-form-age students have a further education option on the same patch.
Ashford also has St James Senior Boys' School, an independent that moved in 2010 into the Gothic Revival buildings north of Ashford station, designed by Henry Clutton for a school founded there in 1857. Two other local schools in the area's records have closed, so anyone working from an old list of options should check it against the council's current directory. Some families will look past Ashford for a church secondary, and the council's admissions rules decide those places too.
Schools are one of Ashford's real strengths. The town sits inside one of the better-inspected counties in England, the primaries are on the doorstep, and the hard part for parents is the admissions paperwork, with the schools themselves the easy bit.