Bloxham's schools are a real reason to live here, and most families never have to look past the parish boundary. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The village has its own primary and its own secondary. Two fee-paying schools are within reach as well. For a place this size the choice is unusually full, though that is a different thing from every child getting their first choice.
Ofsted has graded 121 schools and settings across Oxfordshire, and 108 of them are good or better, close to nine in ten. Eleven of those are outstanding, ten require improvement and three are inadequate. Another 151 settings hold no published grade yet, and they sit outside those counts. The Oxfordshire figures cover the whole county, so they describe the system the village draws on and say nothing about any single classroom here.
At primary age the obvious school is Bloxham Church of England Primary School, and the surrounding villages are ringed with small Church of England primaries much like it. The Department for Transport's modelled times, from 2019, put the nearest primary about 15 minutes' walk from a typical home in the area, or eight minutes by car. Oxfordshire County Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, and a church school's own oversubscription criteria can come into it too, so a house two streets from the gate does not hold a place on its own. Families who move in the summer and apply in the autumn learn the order of operations the hard way.
Secondary is where Bloxham differs from most villages. The Warriner School is in the village, so there is no daily bus run into Banbury for the families who get a place. The Bloxham Feoffees, a charity that predates the parish council by several centuries, own land on Grove Road that is rented to the school, which makes the playing fields some of the most carefully governed grass in north Oxfordshire. On the 2019 modelled times the nearest secondary is about 32 minutes' walk from a typical home, ten minutes by car or 18 on public transport, because the wider area runs out to villages such as Milcombe and South Newington. Check Oxfordshire's published admission figures for The Warriner School for recent years and see how far down the list the last child admitted came from, since a village secondary can fill from well beyond its own village.
The independent schools are close as well. Bloxham School is in the village and Tudor Hall School is nearby, so the fee-paying route needs no long drive either. Those two set the tone of the school run here more than the state figures do, with a morning traffic jam that tends to be better polished than most.
Schools are one of Bloxham's real strengths: a village primary, a secondary inside the village and a county system that is mostly good or better.