Epsom's schools are one of the strongest reasons to move there. More than nine in ten schools across the county are rated good or better. The average home is a short walk from a primary. The walk to secondary school is longer but still manageable. The schools are easy to find. Getting a place at the one you want takes more work.
Ofsted has graded 159 schools and other settings across Surrey, the county Epsom sits in, and 147 of them are good or outstanding. That is better than nine in ten. Thirty are outstanding, 7 require improvement and 5 are inadequate. Another 194 settings have no published grade yet and are left out of those counts entirely, so they say nothing about how good those schools are. For a parent searching across Surrey, a good school is the normal case.
Distance is in Epsom's favour. On the Department for Transport's modelled journey times for 2019, the nearest primary is about a 12-minute walk from the average home and the nearest secondary about 19 minutes. Surrey County Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, so a house round the corner from a school does not secure a place there, however short the walk. Church schools such as St Martin's Church of England Infant School and St Martin's Church of England Junior School can apply their own faith criteria on top of the council's. Look up last year's allocations for the school you want, and how far from the gate the last child offered a place lived, alongside the house's other paperwork. Stamford Green Primary School and Nursery and Epsom Primary and Nursery School are among the other primaries in the town.
At secondary level, Glyn School and Rosebery School are the two with the longest local history, and both now belong to the same academy trust. Rosebery began in 1921 as the town's county secondary school for girls. Glyn opened in 1927 under another name and was renamed several times before becoming just Glyn School. After four names in under a century, it settled on the shortest. Blenheim High School, which opened in 1997, and Epsom and Ewell High School complete the secondary choice nearby.
The fee-paying sector is unusually large for a town this size. Kingswood House School is a preparatory school on West Hill, and Ewell Castle School and St Christopher's School are close by. Epsom College opened its buildings in 1855 for the sons of doctors, and within ten years it had opened to any family that could pay the fees. That turned out to be a much bigger market.
Schools are one of Epsom's main strengths. A good school is the normal case here, and most of the effort for parents goes into the admissions form.