The schools around Chalfont St Giles are good, and the primaries are close enough to walk to. The two state primaries nearby score above the national expected standard in maths. More than four in five graded schools across the county are rated good or better by inspectors. Secondary school means leaving the village. The early years are easy here, and most of the planning goes into the move at eleven.
Two mainstream state primaries serve the area, and their pupils average about 107 on the Key Stage 2 maths scale, where 100 is the expected standard. Primary education in the village is split between Chalfont St Giles Infant School and Nursery and Chalfont St Giles Junior School, so moving up from infants to juniors is about the shortest school transfer a child here will ever make. Department for Transport modelling from 2019 puts the nearest primary about a nine-minute walk from the average home. Jordans School and Seer Green Church of England School are also nearby. The village has a long record in teaching, too. Milton's conversation with his former pupil Thomas Ellwood is said to have given him the idea for Paradise Regained, and very few parent evenings have produced a sequel.
Across Buckinghamshire, Ofsted has graded 94 schools and settings, and 80 of them are good or outstanding, comfortably more than four in five. Nineteen of them are outstanding, 11 require improvement and three are inadequate. The rest of the county's settings have no published grade yet and are left out of those counts. Those figures cover the whole county, from the Chilterns villages to the large towns, so they describe the system families here are joining more than the two schools down the road.
Secondary school is where life gets less local. Beaconsfield High School and The Beaconsfield School are the nearest named secondaries, and the 2019 modelling puts the nearest secondary about a 39-minute walk away, ten minutes by car or about 28 minutes by public transport. Buckinghamshire County Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, so living close to a school, or near one with the right name, doesn't guarantee a place, and church schools such as the one at Seer Green may weigh other criteria too. The public transport time is six years old, and school bus routes change more often than school buildings, so check the current route to Beaconsfield for the year your child would start. Children who stroll to the village infants at four are, by eleven, on a timetable that runs to somewhere else.
Schools are one of Chalfont St Giles's real strengths: strong village primaries, a county where most graded schools are good or better, and a secondary journey that is the only real catch.