Dorking's schools are good enough that the only real risk is not getting in. The primaries do well in maths. The town has two state secondaries covering it. Across the county, inspectors rate almost everything good or better. The question around here is rarely which school is failing. It's which one has room.
There are eight mainstream state primaries in the area, and their pupils average a scaled score of about 105 in the end-of-primary maths tests. That figure is a local average, so an individual school can sit above or below it, but it doesn't describe a town where parents are quietly worrying about the basics. Powell Corderoy Primary School is the oldest, tracing itself back to a school founded in 1816 and moving sites more often than most of its former pupils. St Martin's Church of England Primary School and St Paul's Church of England Primary School cover the town's church-school options, and the rest are in the villages around it.
At secondary level the choice is simpler, because there isn't much of one. Two mainstream state secondaries serve the area, The Ashcombe School to the north of the centre and The Priory Church of England School, and their pupils average about 52 on the government's Attainment 8 measure, weighted by pupil numbers. Ashcombe grew out of a boys' high school and a girls' high school that merged and then merged again, and the whole history of Dorking's secondary schooling reads like a series of mergers ending in two names that everyone in town knows.
Ofsted's grades are published for Surrey as a whole, not for Dorking alone, and across the county 147 of the 159 graded settings are rated good or outstanding. That's the overwhelming majority, with 30 rated outstanding. At the other end, 7 are rated requires improvement and 5 inadequate. Those are county-wide numbers, so they tell you what the local authority is like overall, not how any particular school here was graded.
None of this guarantees a place. Living near a named school doesn't secure admission, and the admissions rules, not the estate agent's floor plan, decide who gets the offer letter. Several of the area's schools are church schools with their own criteria, so check each school's published admissions policy and last year's allocations before paying extra for a street because of its supposed catchment. Buyers who skip that step tend to learn the rules the hard way, in spring.
Schools are one of Dorking's real strengths: dependable primaries, two established secondaries and a county where good is the norm rather than the exception, so the only thing you have to earn is the place.