Camberley's schools are the best reason to move here. Nearly every graded school in the county is good or better. Outstanding ones aren't rare. The nearest primary is usually a short walk away. That puts the admissions form ahead of the house on most parents' list of worries.
Ofsted has graded 159 settings across Surrey, and 147 of them are good or outstanding. That's more than nine in ten. The counts cover the whole county, not only Camberley, so they describe the system a Camberley family is applying into rather than the town's own schools one by one. Within those, 30 settings are rated outstanding, 7 require improvement and 5 are inadequate. There are 194 more that have no published overall grade yet, which says nothing either way about how good they are. The odds of ending up somewhere decent are good. The odds of getting the particular school the estate agent mentioned are a separate question.
That separate question is where people come unstuck. A school's name on a listing guarantees nothing, because admissions run on the local authority's rules, and "close to" in an advert isn't the distance the admissions criteria measure. Before exchanging, check the school's own admissions arrangements and the allocation history for the address you're buying. Buyers who skip that step find out the rules in the spring, one letter at a time.
A few names tell the story of the town. Collingwood College was formed in 1971 by merging the town's grammar school with two local secondaries, which is about as Camberley as school history gets: three institutions tidied into one on a sensible site. Kings International College opened in 1947 under a different name, moved to Watchetts Drive in 1959 and took its current name in 2001. South Camberley Primary and Nursery School uses buildings that were once the town's grammar school, so the youngest children now get the premises that used to be for the exam passers. Cordwalles Junior School, the current version founded in 1962, has switched between primary, middle and junior status over the years, much like a family that keeps moving the furniture around.
The rest are spread across the town and the villages it covers, including infant, junior and all-through primaries plus Tomlinscote School as another secondary on the Frimley side. The typical journey is short. The average home is about a 13-minute walk from a primary and about 20 minutes on foot from a secondary. By car, the secondary trip is about 10 minutes, which means a lot of parents who could walk will be in the drop-off queue anyway.
The town's education history also has a couple of good stories. A National school opened here in 1818 in a cottage near the military academy, and one of its early pupils was the composer Arthur Sullivan. A ballet school spent decades in Camberley before moving to Birmingham in 2004, and its old site is now housing called Elmhurst Court. The pirouettes went north and the residents stayed put.
This is Camberley at its best. The county's grades are overwhelmingly strong, the journeys are short, and the one real risk is buying a house on the assumption that it comes with a particular school.