The schools are one of the easiest things about Cold Ash to like. Nearly every graded school in the district is good or better. None is rated inadequate. The village has its own primary. The hard part is not finding a good school but getting a place at the one you picked.
Ofsted has published an overall grade for 23 schools in the West Berkshire count used here, and 21 of them are rated good or better, which is nine in ten. That is the local-authority picture, not a count of schools inside Cold Ash itself. Two are outstanding, two require improvement and none is inadequate. Another 42 settings have no published grade yet, which says nothing either way about them; they simply have not been graded in the form counted here. On paper, this is the kind of district where the worry is choosing between good options rather than avoiding bad ones.
Living near a school does not guarantee a place at it. Admissions run on the council's and each school's published criteria, and church schools can weigh other factors on top of distance. Buyers who assume the house comes with the school tend to learn otherwise from a letter in the spring, usually after the removal van has gone. Check the admission rules for the specific school and the specific year before the offer goes in, not after.
The village school is Cold Ash St Mark's CE Primary School, and the ward's other main village has Chieveley Primary School, so both ends of the patch have a primary of their own. The Department for Transport's modelled times, from 2019, put the nearest primary about 8 minutes away by car or 17 minutes on foot, which is a school run that does not need a battle plan. Secondary is a different trip: about 15 minutes by car, 40 by public transport, and roughly 70 on foot. Secondaries in the wider area include Trinity School, Park House School and St Bartholomew's School. For most families the secondary years are when the second car stops being a luxury.
The ward also contains Downe House, a boarding school, which is why the local age figures carry an unusual bulge of teenagers. It is a separate world from the village primary and the state secondaries, and buyers choosing Cold Ash for the schools will mostly be thinking about the latter.
For a family that can afford the house, the schools are one of Cold Ash's real strengths. The primaries are close, the district's record is strong, and the only thing standing between most children and a good school is the admissions paperwork.