Cheshunt's schools are good, and better than the rest of what the town offers. The primaries do well in the tests. Almost nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. A family can walk to the nearest one before the cereal goes soggy. The schools are the strongest reason to move here.
Cheshunt has 18 mainstream state primaries, and in the Key Stage 2 maths test their pupils averaged a score of about 105, comfortably above the standard the test is built around. Dewhurst St Mary CofE Primary School teaches children in a listed building, so the classrooms are older than the rules about how big a classroom should be. Flamstead End School takes its name from the part of town it serves, so at least one school name tells you where it is. Holdbrook Primary School and Nursery and Woodside Primary School complete a spread that leaves no corner of the town far from a primary.
Cheshunt's four mainstream state secondaries averaged an Attainment 8 score of about 46, weighted by pupil numbers. Attainment 8 adds up how pupils did across their eight best-counted GCSE subjects. Goffs Academy and Goffs - Churchgate Academy share a name, a family resemblance and a corner of the town's map. Families on the Turnford side will look at Haileybury Turnford, and families who want a church school will look at St Mary's Church of England High School. That covers it, and four secondaries is enough to choose between without anyone needing a spreadsheet.
Ofsted has graded 203 of the 227 inspected settings across Hertfordshire as good or outstanding. That is almost nine in ten, and 40 of them are outstanding. Another 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. That is the county's record, and Cheshunt's own schools are a slice of it. Another 226 Hertfordshire settings have no published overall grade yet. That means only that they haven't been graded, and it says nothing about how good they are.
Living near a school does not get your child a place in it. Places are allocated under Hertfordshire County Council's published admissions rules, which put church-school faith criteria, siblings and distance in their own order. Look up how far from the gate the last place went at the school you want, because that distance changes from year to year. The family two streets further out who assumed they were in usually find out in April.
Schools are one of Cheshunt's real strengths. Parents choosing between good primaries and a respectable set of secondaries have an easier decision than the one they made about the commute.