They are good, and unusually consistently so. Nearly every graded setting in the wider authority sits at good or better. A handful are outstanding. None are inadequate. This is the rare case where a town's schools are not the thing you have to make peace with in order to live there.
Ofsted has published overall effectiveness grades for 41 settings across the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole authority, and 38 of them are good or better. That is more than nine in ten. Six carry the top grade of outstanding, three require improvement, and none are rated inadequate. Those counts cover the whole council area rather than Christchurch alone, so they describe the pool a family here is choosing from, not a scorecard for any one street. A further 41 settings hold no published overall grade, either because they have not yet been inspected or because their inspection type does not produce one. They are not bad, they are simply unrated, and folding them into the totals would be dishonest arithmetic.
The thing that ratings will not tell you is whether you get in. A school two streets away is a school you might attend, not a school you will attend, and admission runs on the authority's own criteria rather than on how close the postcode feels. Anyone buying specifically for a named school should confirm the current admissions arrangements with the council before the survey, not after the exchange. Boundaries move, intakes fill, and the estate agent showing you the property is under no obligation to know either.
At secondary level the town runs on three: Twynham School, Highcliffe School and The Grange School. The three share a sixth form across their sites, with different courses at each, which is a sensible bit of local cooperation and also means the sixth-form question is answered by geography less than parents expect. Twynham is the one carrying the town's name and identity, and it feeds from the primaries clustered around the centre.
The primary picture is broad rather than thin. Christchurch Infant School and Christchurch Junior School sit at the heart of it, with The Priory Church of England Primary School attached to the town's oldest institution and Twynham Primary School named for what the town was called before the Normans arrived and started building. Beyond the centre, Mudeford, Somerford, Burton, Sopley and Highcliffe all have their own primaries, so the outlying neighbourhoods are not sending children on long journeys to be educated. There are also specialist settings in the area, including Portfield School and a small number of others serving particular needs.
Getting there is not the problem it is in some places. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the average primary school at around 13 minutes on foot, roughly 8 minutes by car and about 12 minutes by public transport. Secondary schools sit further out, at about 23 minutes walking, roughly 10 minutes driving and around 18 minutes on public transport. Those are 2019 models, and the public transport figures age faster than the walking ones, but the walking numbers are the honest measure of whether a school run needs a car. Mostly it does not.
Schools are the strongest thing on this page and it is not a close contest. In a town where the median resident is comfortably past the school gates, the education provision has held up far better than the demographics would lead anyone to guess.