Good, once you work out what a middle school is. Dorset never adopted the primary-and-secondary split most of the country uses, so children here move through first, then middle, then upper. About eight in ten graded settings across the county come out good or better. Two are rated outstanding. The quality is not the thing that catches people out. The extra leaving assembly is.
Ofsted has published overall grades for 86 settings across Dorset, and 68 of those are good or better, which is roughly eight in ten. Two are outstanding, 17 require improvement, and one is inadequate. Those are authority-wide counts covering the whole of Dorset rather than Ferndown alone, so treat them as the weather across the county rather than a reading taken at your own front gate. A further 52 settings carry no published overall grade at all, which is an absence of a verdict rather than a bad one, and anyone presenting it as a bad one is selling something.
The three-tier structure is the single most useful thing to understand before you commit to a postcode here. A child starting in Ferndown does not do the standard two moves. They do three, and the timing of each is different from what a family arriving from a two-tier county will have planned around. It is not worse. It is just not what your spreadsheet assumed, and the year groups do not care about your spreadsheet.
Ferndown Upper School is the comprehensive at the top of the chain, taking teenagers from its feeder middle schools in Ferndown, West Moors and Verwood. Ferndown First School sits at the other end of the same chain, on a site that has already been reshuffled once in the town's history of shuffling school sites. Parley First School serves the eastern edge. Beaucroft Foundation School provides for pupils with additional needs, which matters enormously to the families who need it and is invisible to everyone else until the day it is not. Beyond the state chain there is a well-populated independent sector nearby, including Canford School, which occupies a site with a medieval kitchen attached and charges accordingly. The remaining first schools are scattered across the surrounding villages in Colehill, Hampreston, Wimborne and out toward Cranborne, and most are the small rural sort where the intake is the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood is small.
None of this guarantees you a place. Naming a school is not the same as being offered one, and admission depends on the authority's allocation rules and how many other families reached the same conclusion you did in the same year. Distance from the school gate does a lot of work in that process, which is a polite way of saying that the closes nearest the popular schools tend to hold their price for reasons that have nothing to do with the brickwork. Buyers who read the admissions criteria before the property listing get what they planned for. Buyers who read the listing first find out in the spring, when the offer arrives and the arithmetic turns out to have been honest all along.
Schools are the strongest thing Ferndown has going for it after safety, and the county-level record backs that up rather than flattering it. Learn the three-tier system before you buy, and the rest of it takes care of itself.