Aylesbury's schools are very good, and the town has the county's selective system on its doorstep at a fraction of the house prices the rest of Buckinghamshire charges for it. Three grammar schools in one town. Most of the county's graded schools at good or better. Only three graded inadequate anywhere in it. The houses are ordinary; the school list is anything but.
Across Buckinghamshire, Ofsted has graded 94 schools, and 80 of them are good or outstanding, comfortably more than four in five. Nineteen hold the outstanding grade, 11 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Another 94 settings have no published grade yet, and their absence from the count says nothing either way about how they are doing. These are county figures covering everything from the Chilterns to the Vale, so they describe the system Aylesbury belongs to. The town gets that system at its own prices, an arbitrage local parents spotted a long time ago.
The selective schools are the reason families look at Aylesbury. Aylesbury Grammar School, Aylesbury High School and Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School are all in the town, and Aylesbury Grammar was founded in 1598, with its original building now part of the county museum on Church Street. A school that has been turned into a museum never has to sit another inspection. Places at all three, and at every other school here, are allocated under Buckinghamshire Council's published admissions rules, with selection on top for the grammars, so the house nearest the gate buys a short walk and nothing more. For families whose child does not go the grammar route, The Mandeville School and The Kingsbrook School are among the town's non-selective secondaries, alongside an academy, a university technical college and a further education college. The council's selection test timetable for your child's year of entry is worth reading well ahead, because the test arrives earlier in Year 6 than most newcomers expect, and parents who moved in during the summer have found that out the hard way.
The primaries are spread across the estates and the villages this page also covers, so most children have one close to home. Children in Bedgrove, Watermead, Fairford Leys or Waddesdon start primary school without needing a car. Parents start thinking about secondary school in Year 4, and by Year 5 they are discussing it at the school gate like a mortgage rate.
Schools are one of Aylesbury's real strengths, and the grammar system puts them within reach of families who could never afford the county's pricier addresses.