Cheltenham's schools are very good, and its most famous ones charge fees. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The town has a grammar school older than the spa. Two of its private schools were founded in the Victorian boom. Finding a good school here is easy, and getting a place at one can be harder.
Ofsted has graded 156 schools across Gloucestershire, and 136 of them are good or outstanding, close to nine in ten. Nine hold the top grade and 19 require improvement. One is rated inadequate. Another 95 settings across the county have no published grade yet, which tells you only that they have not been graded. With nearly nine in ten at good or better, a family arriving in Cheltenham starts from a strong position.
Places are allocated by Gloucestershire County Council under its published admissions rules, so buying a house near a school you like does not guarantee a place there. Distance matters, and so do siblings, faith criteria at church schools and, for a grammar school, the entrance test. Charlton Kings Junior School and Naunton Park Primary School are the kind of names that appear in property particulars, but the council has never promised a place to a postcode. Check the council's admission criteria and last year's allocations for the specific schools you want while you are still choosing streets, because once you own the house it is too late to move it.
On the state side, Pate's Grammar School is the oldest school in town, founded in 1574, and it was teaching Cheltenham for well over a century before anyone thought of drinking the water. Cheltenham Bournside School and Sixth Form Centre has been on its current site since 1972 and takes the comprehensive load alongside Balcarras School, Pittville School, All Saints' Academy and The High School Leckhampton. That is a wide choice for one town, and it gives parents room to choose.
Then there is the fee-paying layer the town is known for. Cheltenham College, founded in 1841, was the first of the Victorian public schools, and in 1872 it began the cricket festival now billed as the oldest in the world. In 1968 it let Lindsay Anderson film if.... on site, and few schools would trust a film director with their reputation like that. Cheltenham Ladies' College, founded in 1853, is the school The Good Schools Guide calls the most famous in town, and Dean Close School followed in 1886. Between them they give the town its reputation, though most Cheltenham children will never walk through their gates.
For families, the schools are among the best reasons to live here. The state schools carry most of the work, the private schools carry the reputation, and the admissions rules decide who gets where.