Schools are one of Chinnor's real strengths, at least until the age of eleven. Close to nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The village has two primaries of its own. For a typical home, a primary is about a ten-minute walk away. Secondary school means a car or a bus, and that is the part families need to plan for.
Oxfordshire's inspection record does most of the work here. Of the 121 settings in the county holding a published overall grade, Ofsted rates 108 good or better, which is almost nine in every ten. Eleven of them are outstanding. Ten require improvement and three are inadequate, which is a small number until it is your child's school. Another 151 settings in Oxfordshire have no published grade yet, so they say nothing either way about quality.
Chinnor has two primaries, Mill Lane Community Primary School and St Andrew's Church of England Primary School, and parents in the village tend to sort themselves between the two. Oxfordshire County Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so living two streets from either gate does not reserve a desk, however the house was marketed. The Department for Transport's 2019 model put the nearest primary at about 11 minutes' walk for the typical Chinnor home, or seven minutes by car. Secondary school is a different trip: about 17 minutes by car and 30 by public transport, and the bus figure is the one most likely to have changed since 2019. On foot it takes about 105 minutes, long enough for a twelve-year-old to warm to the bus. Families looking at houses here can ask the county council which secondary school a particular address normally feeds into and how pupils from the village get there, since that answer shapes the next seven years more than the choice between two primaries does.
For a village this size, schooling is a clear strength: two primaries within walking distance, a county where most graded schools are good or better, and a secondary journey that takes planning but rarely causes real problems.