Caddington's schools are one of its strengths, and the village has a secondary school of its own that started life somewhere else. Primary maths results are solid. The secondary's exam results are middling. Across the wider county, almost nine in ten graded schools come out good or better. The village school, as the name suggests, is where most of the parental attention goes.
Around here, the three mainstream state primaries averaged a maths score of about 105 in the end-of-primary tests. Caddington Village School is the one carrying the village's name, and it is the product of several older village schools combined into one. Slip End Village School is the neighbouring option. Caddington Village School is three schools under one name, which at least saves parents an argument about which one to aim for.
The area has one mainstream state secondary on the count, and its pupils scored about 43 on the government's eight-subject measure of exam results at sixteen. Manshead Church of England Academy is the secondary in the village. It began as a grammar school in Dunstable, changed its name along the way, and moved to Caddington in 1971. Dunstable lost a grammar school to the village up the hill and nobody has offered to give it back.
Across Central Bedfordshire as a whole, Ofsted has graded 52 of 59 settings good or outstanding, almost nine in ten. One is outstanding, five require improvement and two are inadequate. A further 43 settings hold no published grade yet and sit outside those counts. With one outstanding school in the whole authority, the word turns up far more often in house particulars than in inspection reports.
Living near Caddington Village School or Manshead won't secure a child a place. Places go by Central Bedfordshire Council's published admissions rules, which put siblings and other criteria ahead of how close a house is, and a buyer who reads those rules for the specific school before signing anything knows more than most of the parents at the gate. It's worth looking up the admissions rules and the last few years of allocations for the school you have in mind. The parents who read the oversubscription criteria all the way through are a minority, and they tend to be the ones who get the place.
Caddington's schools are a good reason to live here: a village primary with steady results, a secondary inside the parish, and a county where good is the normal grade.