Berkhamsted's schools are very good, and that is why the houses cost what they do. The primaries score well above the usual line in maths. The one state secondary gets results most counties would want. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. In this town, the school run starts with the mortgage.
Around here, there are eight mainstream state primaries, and their pupils average about 105 in the end-of-primary maths scaled score. That covers the town and its edges. Swing Gate Infant School and Nursery takes the youngest children on the Berkhamsted side, and Potten End Church of England Primary School and Little Gaddesden Church of England Voluntary Aided Primary School serve the villages up towards Ashridge. Parents in the villages get a smaller school and a bigger garden, and the trade-off arrives with the first set of muddy wellies at the door.
The area has a single mainstream state secondary, Ashlyns School, and its pupils average about 58 on Attainment 8, the measure built from their best eight GCSE-level subjects. With one state secondary, families around here don't spend Year 6 choosing between four schools. Ashlyns teaches in a Grade II listed neo-Georgian building, so the teenagers face the same conservation rules as their parents' kitchen extensions.
Hertfordshire is where the inspection numbers come from, and they cover the whole county. Ofsted has graded 227 settings across it, and 203 of them are good or outstanding, nearly nine in ten. Of those, 40 are outstanding, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Many more settings have not been graded yet, and that tells you nothing about them either way. A county average says little about one particular classroom, but this is a strong county to be averaged into.
Hertfordshire County Council allocates state school places by its own published admissions rules, so living near a school does not secure a place there, however short the walk. A school's allocation history is published, and checking how far away last year's furthest successful applicant lived is one of the more useful half-hours a buyer here can spend. The parents who did that check will have the distance memorised before anyone else in the street. They tend to bring it up at barbecues.
The independent sector is old and close by. Berkhamsted School is fee-paying and was founded by John Incent, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, which is a lot of history to load onto a child's spelling test. Egerton-Rothesay School is a small independent school for pupils with special educational needs, and it is one reason families with a child who needs that support look at Berkhamsted at all.
The schools are one of Berkhamsted's real strengths. They are strong at primary and strong at secondary, and the main difficulty is the price of a house close enough to get in.