Botley's schools are a broad, church-flavoured spread rather than a single star name. The village has its own primary at Botley Church of England Controlled Primary School, and beyond it sits a wide ring of village schools plus a choice of secondaries within reach. What Botley gives a family is coverage and options, not a league-table headline to brag about at the school gate. The honest read is that this is a place where the school question is less about which is best and more about which one you live nearest. That is a good problem to have, and a quietly boring one.
At primary level the choice fans out across Botley and the villages around it. Alongside the Botley Church of England school, families draw on the likes of Shamblehurst Primary School, Wellstead Primary School, Boorley Park, Kings Copse Primary School, Curdridge Primary School, and the paired Freegrounds Infant School and Freegrounds Junior School. Push a little further and the church schools of the Meon villages come into range, from Durley and Curdridge out toward Bishop's Waltham and Swanmore. It is a lot of small schools serving a lot of small settlements, which is exactly what a commuter village stitched into a rural district looks like on paper.
Living near one of these gates is not the same as walking through it. Places are allocated on the council's admissions rules, and distance is the blunt instrument that does most of the sorting. A house advertised as being in a school's shadow buys you proximity, not a seat, and the offer letter in the spring is where families find out the difference between the two. The church primaries add their own faith criteria on top, which shuffles the queue again for anyone hoping to use one. Read the small print before you read the estate agent's floorplan.
For secondary, the reachable options include Wildern School, Swanmore College, and Deer Park School, which is the sort of small spread that means most Botley teenagers have somewhere to go without a marathon commute. As with the primaries, admission runs on the council's criteria rather than on whichever name the previous owners mentioned when they sold you the house. The catchment lines move, the rules get revised, and the safe move is to check the current year's allocation rather than trust local folklore.
Botley's schools are a decent, unflashy middle: plenty of choice, nothing that screams, and a system that rewards families who understand the admissions rules over families who assume the nearest gate is theirs. Sort out the catchment before you sort out the mortgage, and the rest looks after itself.