The schools around Berkeley are good, and the county they belong to is one of the steadier places in England to be a parent. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the wider area are good or better. The town has its own primary. Its old secondary closed years ago, and the replacement teaches engineering and cyber security on the site of a decommissioned nuclear power station, which is a sentence no other town's prospectus can print.
Gloucestershire, the authority whose figures these are, has 136 of its 156 graded schools rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, close to nine in every ten. Nine are outstanding, 19 require improvement and one is inadequate, so a family moving in is choosing from a list where the bad news is rare and mostly easy to spot. Another 95 settings hold no published overall grade yet, which tells you nothing either way. These are county-wide counts, and they describe a large and varied county more than the few streets around Berkeley Town Hall.
Berkeley Primary School is the one that carries the town's name, and the Department for Transport's modelled journey times from 2019 put the nearest primary about 16 minutes' walk from the typical home, or eight minutes by car. Places go by the council's published admissions rules, so buying near the school gate earns proximity and nothing more, whatever the photos of the gate might suggest. Sharpness Primary School and Stone with Woodford Church of England Primary School serve the villages round about, and a church school's admissions criteria can carry conditions a community school's do not, so Gloucestershire County Council's published policy for whichever school you want is worth reading in full while the house is still only a viewing.
Secondary is where the geography starts to matter. The town's own secondary school closed in 2011, and since 2017 SGS Berkeley Green University Technical College has operated on the old power station site with a specialism in engineering and cyber security. It is a specialist college, and plenty of families will look at it alongside more conventional secondaries further afield. Those same 2019 modelled times put the nearest secondary about 23 minutes away by public transport, 14 by car, or 50 on foot. A child who strolled to primary in a quarter of an hour finds out at eleven exactly how far the Vale of Berkeley stretches.
The rest of the local options are smaller and more specialised, from independent provision such as Aurora Severnside School to the OneSchool Global campus. They fill particular needs and will not be the deciding factor for most buyers.
Schools are one of Berkeley's real strengths, provided the family is ready to treat the secondary years as a short commute. The primaries are close, the county is solid, and the town where Edward Jenner trained his own replacement as local doctor has kept education close to home for at least that long.