Schools are the part of Chipping Ongar that earns its price. There are five state primaries in the area, and their maths results come out on the right side of the line. All secondary pupils go to the same school. Across the county, nearly nine in ten graded schools are good or better. Parents get a short list to choose from, and most of it is good news.
The five mainstream state primaries around here average a Key Stage 2 maths score of about 104. The school carrying the town's name is Chipping Ongar Primary School, on Greensted Road at the southern edge of town. It was formed in the mid-1980s when the infant school left its Victorian buildings off the High Street and merged with the junior school. Ongar Primary School is just north of the town in Shelley, and the villages have their own, among them High Ongar Primary School and Moreton Church of England Voluntary Aided Primary School. The old infant site behind Budworth Hall is now a Sainsbury's, so plenty of parents still do a run to that address, only with a trolley.
There is one mainstream state secondary in the area, The Ongar Academy in Shelley, and its pupils averaged an Attainment 8 score of about 37. One school is one set of results, and a single cohort can move that number further than any amount of parental worrying. The name has history, too. Ongar had an Ongar Academy in 1845, a private boys' boarding school that later became a grammar school and closed in 1940, with no link to the current one beyond the sign on the gate.
Ofsted has graded 246 schools across Essex, and 218 of them are good or better, close to nine in ten. Of those, 22 are outstanding. On the other side, 23 require improvement and 5 are inadequate. That is a county-wide count, so it describes the system Ongar's children are taught in, without saying anything specific about the schools nearest the High Street. Places are handed out under Essex County Council's published admissions rules, and living near a named school does not secure a place there. For Moreton's primary in particular, the admissions policy is worth reading in full, because a voluntary aided church school sets its own criteria and some of them may have nothing to do with how close you live. The map gets most families where they expected to go. The policy decides the rest.
For a small town, the schools are a real strength: strong primaries, a county system that is mostly good or better, and one secondary on the doorstep.