The schools in Cookham are good, and the primaries are the best part. Each of the village's three settlements has its own primary. Primary maths results are strong. Most of the borough's inspected schools are rated good or better. Secondary school means a longer journey, and at that point the whole of the Thames Valley becomes your catchment area.
Cookham's primaries are local in the most literal sense. Holy Trinity CofE Primary School, Cookham serves the old village, Cookham Rise Primary School serves the Rise and Cookham Dean CofE Primary School serves the Dean. Across the five mainstream state primaries in the area, the average Key Stage 2 maths scaled score is about 106. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about a ten-minute walk from the average home. Children here can walk to primary school in less time than a car takes to find a parking space at the gate.
Secondary is where the distances grow. There is one mainstream state secondary in the area, and its pupils average an Attainment 8 score of about 48. On the same 2019 modelling the nearest secondary is about a 36-minute walk, an 11-minute drive or about 26 minutes by public transport. Bus routes have changed since then, so the public transport time is the least reliable of the three. Furze Platt Senior School and Sir William Borlase's Grammar School are both among the secondaries parents in the area look at, which puts a comprehensive and a grammar school on the same shortlist. For Cookham children, secondary age is when they discover how far the village is from everything else.
Ofsted's grades here cover all of Windsor and Maidenhead, so the count isn't specific to Cookham. Across the borough, 21 of the 25 graded settings are rated good or better, which is more than four in five. Two are outstanding, three require improvement and one is inadequate. A further 32 settings have no published grade yet, which tells you nothing either way about their quality. The inspection report for any school you are considering is free to read on Ofsted's website, and it takes less time to read than the walk to the gate.
Living close to one of these schools helps, but the council allocates places using its published admissions rules, so a house near the gate doesn't guarantee a place, and two of the three village primaries are Church of England schools whose rules can weigh more than distance. Parents who bought for the school and never opened the admissions policy usually read it very carefully the following spring.
Schools are one of Cookham's real strengths. The primaries are close and strong, and the borough's inspection record backs them up. The only harder part comes at eleven, when the journey to school gets longer.