Dunstable's schools are good, and parents here have less to worry about than they might expect. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the wider council area are rated good or better. There are 23 state primaries around the town. Five state secondaries take over after that. Whatever else a family worries about here, it does not need to be the school run.
Across the 23 mainstream state primaries in the area, the average maths score at the end of primary school is about 103 on the national scaled test. Some of the town's primaries still carry the old "lower school" label, among them Dunstable Icknield Lower School and Watling Lower School. Beecroft Academy and Lancot School serve the estates to the north and west. Two of the four are named after the roads that cross in the middle of town. Watling Street was paved by the Romans, and the Icknield Way was there before them.
The five mainstream state secondaries in the area have a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of about 42. Priory Academy takes children from nine to sixteen as a combined middle and upper school. It is the one secondary in town without a sixth form, so its pupils change school at sixteen whether they want to or not. All Saints Academy Dunstable and Manshead Church of England Academy are among the other options and both keep their pupils on to eighteen. The Chiltern School and Weatherfield Academy are special schools that take pupils from across Central Bedfordshire.
Central Bedfordshire, the authority that covers Dunstable and its villages, has 52 of its 59 graded settings rated good or better by Ofsted. That is close to nine in ten. One of them is outstanding, five require improvement and two are inadequate, and the authority-wide figures do not say which towns those seven are in. A further 43 settings have no published grade yet. That is because they have not been inspected under the current framework, and it does not mean they are failing.
Places are allocated under Central Bedfordshire Council's published admissions rules, so living close to a named school does not secure a place there. The council can tell you how far last year's offers reached for the school you have in mind, and that is worth asking before you start measuring walks. Owning a house that overlooks Priory Academy's playing fields gets you a view of a school, and that is all it gets you until the allocation letter arrives.
For a family weighing up Dunstable, the schools are a reason to move here.