Schools are one of the best reasons to buy in Chalford. The village has five state primaries around it, and their maths results are comfortably decent. There's one secondary, and it holds its own. Nearly nine in ten schools across the county are graded good or better. Plenty of parents move to the valley for the hills and find the school list is a bonus they hadn't counted on.
The five mainstream state primaries in the area averaged about 105 in the Key Stage 2 maths assessment, the scaled score every Year 6 pupil sits. Chalford Hill Primary School is the one carrying the village's name. Further up the slopes are Oakridge Parochial School and Bisley Blue Coat Church of England Primary School. Places at all of them go by Gloucestershire County Council's published admissions rules, and living near a school's gate doesn't secure a place, so read each school's oversubscription criteria for your own address while the house is still a listing, and pay most attention at the church schools, where faith criteria can sit alongside distance. In a village built on terraces cut into a hill, the walk to school can be short on the map and steep on the legs.
The one mainstream state secondary in the area, Thomas Keble School, has a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of about 48. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the typical secondary about 21 minutes away by public transport and about 33 minutes on foot. That's a long walk for a thirteen-year-old with a bag of textbooks, so most families end up working out the school bus or the lift rota anyway.
Ofsted has graded 156 schools and settings across Gloucestershire, and 136 of them, nearly nine in ten, came out good or outstanding. Of those, 9 are rated outstanding, while 19 require improvement and 1 is inadequate. Settings without a published grade aren't counted either way. The figure covers the whole county from the valley down to the cities, so it describes the authority's schools in general and can't speak for the classroom your child would end up in.
Christ Church Church of England Primary School has closed and is no longer an option, though older guides may still list it. The parents who do best here have read the admissions rules before the removal van arrives, and the ones writing to the council in April mostly skipped that step.
Chalford's schools are a real strength. The primaries are sound and the secondary is respectable, and the main thing families have to work out is the hill between home and the school gate.