Crawley's schools are better than its reputation. More than four in five graded schools are good or outstanding. The outstanding ones outnumber the failing ones comfortably. Most children live a short walk from a primary. The postwar planners put a school at the centre of every neighbourhood, and that still looks like one of their better decisions.
At primary level the published results are thin. Only one mainstream state primary in the area carries a Key Stage 2 maths average, at 106, and one school's score can't describe a whole town, however keen a parents' forum is to make it. The more useful fact is where the primaries sit. The original design gave each neighbourhood its own school beside its shops and church, which is why names like Three Bridges Primary School, Maidenbower Junior School and West Green Primary School map onto the neighbourhoods they serve. The Department for Transport's modelling puts the average walk to a primary at about 9 minutes and to a secondary at about 18. Even so, the school run still clogs the closes at twenty to nine, because a walkable school has never once stopped a determined parent from driving to it.
Ofsted's grades here cover the whole of West Sussex, not Crawley alone, and they read well. Of 122 settings with a published grade, 103 are good or outstanding, which is more than four in five. Eleven are outstanding, 17 require improvement and 2 are rated inadequate. That leaves a minority worth checking before you commit to a street, but it is a minority, and the house hunters who treat every Crawley school as a gamble are working from the town's reputation rather than the inspection reports. Another 125 settings hold no published grade yet, which makes them unknown rather than poor.
At secondary level the town has a clear set of options, including Hazelwick School, Thomas Bennett Community College and The Gatwick School, an all-through free school that opened in 2014 and takes children from reception to sixteen. Crawley moved from first, middle and secondary schools to the standard primary and secondary split in 2004, so anyone who grew up locally and remembers middle school should know those schools have since been reorganised, and in some cases renamed.
Buying near a school does not buy you a place at it. Admissions run on the local authority's published criteria for each school, and the rules for a church school or an oversubscribed one can be very different from the distance a buyer measured on a map. The parents who read the admissions criteria before the particulars tend to get the school they wanted. The ones who didn't find out on offer day, with the sold board already up. Check the criteria and the last few years' allocations for the exact address before an offer goes in, not after the survey.
Schools are among the best reasons to live in Crawley, and the gap between their record and the town's reputation is one a sharp buyer can make use of.