The schools around Bourton-on-the-Water are good, and they are the one part of the local picture nobody needs to talk down. Almost nine in ten graded schools across the county come out good or better. Inadequate ones are close to non-existent. The village has its own primary and a secondary on the doorstep. For a place most people know from a day trip, the education turns out to be the serious part.
Gloucestershire has 136 schools rated good or better by Ofsted out of 156 with a published grade, almost nine in ten. Nine are outstanding, 19 require improvement and one is inadequate. Another 95 settings have no published grade, either because they have not been inspected yet or because they sit outside the grading, and they say nothing about quality either way. These are county-wide counts, so they describe the schools a Bourton family is choosing among, which is a wider set than the village's own.
Bourton-on-the-Water Primary School carries the village's name and is the obvious first stop, though living down the road does not promise anyone a place. Gloucestershire County Council allocates places by its published admissions rules, so it is worth reading the criteria for the specific school you want and finding out how far away last year's last offer went. Within reach there are also The Rissington School, Northleach Church of England Primary School and Stow-on-the-Wold Primary School, plus a run of small Church of England village primaries serving the hamlets around. The surrounding villages send their children in. Bourton does not send its children out.
The Cotswold Academy is the secondary, and its history explains a lot about it. It opened in 1988 when the village's secondary modern merged with a grammar school in Northleach, became an academy in 2010, and was named comprehensive school of the year for 2015/16. Putting a grammar and a secondary modern under one roof ended the eleven-plus argument in this part of the Cotswolds by taking the eleven-plus away. Families moving in for the secondary are buying into a school that settled its selection row more than thirty years ago.
The schools are one of the real reasons to live in Bourton. A family can look at both the primary and the secondary without lowering their expectations for either.