Bishop's Stortford's schools are very good, and getting into them is the hard part. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. Three of the town's state secondaries regularly appear near the top of national school rankings. Two of them teach boys and girls separately until the sixth form. Plenty of parents want those places, so the admissions rules decide who gets one.
Across Hertfordshire, Ofsted has graded 227 schools and settings, and 203 of them are good or outstanding, close to nine in ten. Forty are rated outstanding, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Another 226 settings in the county have no published grade yet, either because they have not been inspected or because they are too new. These are county figures, so the good rate describes Hertfordshire as a whole. A weak school can be one town over without it showing in the headline.
Hertfordshire County Council is the admissions authority for the town's state schools. Parents tend to talk about catchments, but places are given out under the council's published admissions rules, and living near a school does not guarantee a place at it. It is worth looking up how the council allocated places at your target schools in recent years, because buying close to a school only helps if those rules work in your favour. The Bishop's Stortford High School takes boys and The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College takes girls from year seven to eleven, and both run mixed sixth forms. So a brother and sister who shared a bedroom for eleven years go to different schools at eleven.
Hockerill Anglo-European College completes the trio that appears near the top of the national rankings, alongside the two single-sex schools. All of the town's state primaries have a nursery attached, all of the state secondaries have a sixth form, and St Michael's Church of England Primary School is one of the primaries in town. For families paying fees, Bishop's Stortford College takes pupils from four to eighteen. The town has no further education college of its own, so sixth-form leavers looking for one travel to colleges in neighbouring towns. The town's old grammar school dated from the sixteenth century and taught Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson's manservant. It has since closed, and the league tables are now led by the schools that came after it.
Schools are Bishop's Stortford's strongest suit. Once a child has a place the quality is very high, and getting the place is the part parents worry about.