The schools are the best argument for moving to Dover. Nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The town has its own grammar schools. A primary is usually a short walk from home. People who come for the cheap houses end up staying for the classrooms.
Ofsted has graded 245 schools and settings across Kent, and 221 of them are good or better, which is about nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. On the other side, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. These counts cover the whole local authority, not only Dover, so they describe the system your child enters rather than the building at the end of your road. Another 255 settings hold no published grade yet, and they're left out of the count rather than assumed to be good or bad. Kent is a big county, and it isn't hard to see why estate agents prefer quoting the headline to explaining it.
Department for Transport modelling from 2019 puts the nearest primary about 7 minutes' walk from the average home, and a secondary about 18 minutes on foot or 15 by public transport. In practice most children can walk to primary school, and most secondary pupils won't be spending their childhood on a bus.
Living near a school doesn't guarantee a place at it. Admissions run on the council's rules, and those rules change more often than the brochures do. Dover's grammar schools add a second filter: Dover Grammar School for Boys and Dover Grammar School for Girls both admit through the Dover Test or the Kent Test. That means the address gets your child into the conversation and the test decides the rest. Parents who assume otherwise usually find out in the spring, from a letter.
A few names say a lot about the area. The two grammar schools sit alongside the Duke of York's Royal Military School, a selective secondary and a sight you won't find in most towns this size. Dover Christ Church Academy in Whitfield is the non-selective option on the northern side. River Primary School serves the village just north of the town. The rest of the primaries spread across the town and the surrounding villages, from the coast out to the Downs, so most families have more than one realistic choice within walking distance.
The honest caveat is that a county-wide grade tells you the odds, not the outcome for any one school. Check the latest report for each school you're considering, and check admissions for the year you're applying, because what the school's website says and what the admissions office says are not always the same.
If Dover gets one thing clearly right, it's the classroom. The schools are one of the town's real strengths, and they're the part of the move you're least likely to regret.