The schools are good, and the odds favour you. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county come out good or better. A primary is usually a short walk from the front door. The secondaries are a bus ride, not an expedition. The real risk is the admissions process, not the classrooms.
Ofsted's figures here cover the whole of Hampshire, not Farnborough alone, so treat them as the pool the town draws from. Of 211 schools with a published overall grade, 185 are rated good or better, which is close to nine in ten. Of those, 27 are outstanding. At the other end, 16 require improvement and 10 are inadequate, so the bad ones exist but they are a small minority. Another 226 settings have no published grade yet. That says nothing about their quality, only that the inspectors haven't got round to them, which parents can relate to.
The distances are short. On the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling, the average home is about a nine-minute walk from a primary school, and about 21 minutes on foot or 18 by public transport from a secondary. The school run here is a walk with a scooter, not a forty-minute crawl in a people carrier. Those public transport times date from 2019, so check the current bus timetable before relying on them.
The state secondaries are the three comprehensives the town has run for years: Cove School on the western side, The Wavell School and Bohunt Farnborough. All three are non-selective and co-educational, so there's no eleven-plus to tutor for, and no set of parents quietly paying for tutoring while claiming they aren't. After sixteen, The Sixth Form College Farnborough takes a large share of the town's teenagers. The private option is Farnborough Hill, an independent girls' school with its own sixth form, alongside a selective independent boys' school. Parents who pay those fees buy a smaller class and a longer drive home from parents' evening.
Primaries are spread across every corner of town, from the infant and junior schools in North and South Farnborough to those in Cove and out towards Hawley and Frogmore. Most of the town is covered by the separate infant-and-junior model, which means two sets of admissions forms and one more uniform to buy. Most parents don't notice the second form until it's due.
Living near a school does not get your child into it. Hampshire allocates places under its own admissions rules, and those rules change more often than house listings admit. A school name in the estate agent's particulars is a sales pitch, not a place offer. Anyone buying for a particular school should read that school's current admissions policy and last year's allocation distances before making an offer, not after moving in.
Schooling is one of Farnborough's real strengths. The grades are strong and the walks are short. The only real homework falls to the parents, and it's the admissions forms.