Schools are one of the better reasons to live in Denham. There are two state primaries nearby. Their Year 6 maths scores are healthy. Across the county, more than eight in ten graded schools are good or better. The difficult part comes at eleven, when the walk to school gets a lot longer.
There are two mainstream state primary schools in the area around Denham, and their pupils' average Year 6 maths score is about 105. Denham Village School has the village's name on the gate, and Denham Green has its own primary academy. The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about 17 minutes' walk away for the typical home, or about 14 minutes by public transport. Two schools is a small sample, though. One strong class can lift the average, and one weaker class can drag it back down the next year.
Across Buckinghamshire, Ofsted has graded 80 of 94 settings good or outstanding, so about five in six are rated good or better. Nineteen of those are outstanding. At the other end, 11 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Those counts cover the whole local authority and say nothing about any school in particular. The county also has settings with no published grade at all. These have simply not been graded yet and are left out of the count.
Living close to a school doesn't secure a place. Buckinghamshire Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, and a house near the gate is just one way of meeting them. The useful check is the council's record of how far away the last child offered a place lived in recent years, for whichever school you are counting on. Just over the parish edge, Harefield Infant School and Harefield Junior School are also on the local list. That gives parents in the north of the village a second option.
Secondary school is where the map catches up with you. Harefield School is the secondary on the local list. The 2019 model puts the nearest secondary about 43 minutes' walk from the typical Denham home, about 25 minutes by public transport and about 13 by car, and bus timetables have probably changed since 2019. A primary within a quarter of an hour's walk turns into a secondary that needs a bus pass or a parent with a car. That is when plenty of Denham families find out how often they will be driving.
On schools, Denham is genuinely good, close to the top of what a family could ask of a village this size. The primaries are local and well regarded. The secondary trip is the one thing parents will need to plan for.