The schools are good, and getting into the ones you want is harder than choosing them. About nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The town has two grammar schools. For most homes the nearest primary is a short walk. Admissions rules decide more here than the inspectors do.
Folkestone's schools come under Kent County Council, so the Ofsted figures below cover the whole county and not only the town. Ofsted has graded 245 settings across Kent, and 221 of them are rated good or outstanding, roughly nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. At the other end, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Another 255 settings have no published grade yet and aren't counted either way. In a county that size, the risk of a poor school is small, though it isn't zero. Parents who treat a single good-or-better figure as a promise about their own child's school are asking the statistic to do too much.
Living near a school doesn't guarantee a place, and nothing on this page is a catchment map. Admissions decide who gets in, and the rules vary from school to school. Before the rules are published, parents tend to be confident about their chances. After offer day, a fair few are angry about them. Check the admissions criteria for each school you're considering, for the year you'd apply, before you exchange contracts.
Secondary schooling in the town is split into two tracks. The Harvey Grammar School for boys was founded in 1674, and The Folkestone School for Girls is its selective counterpart, the two sharing a sixth-form timetable. Because both are grammar schools, a place depends on how the child does as well as where the family lives. Buyers who pay extra to live near a grammar school and then hear the result can be surprised, though an address has never been the whole of the entry requirement. The non-selective options include Folkestone Academy and Turner Free School, which opened in 2018. So the choice of secondary starts with selection and only then gets down to individual schools.
For primary schools, the town has plenty to choose from. The nearest primary is about an 8-minute walk from the average home, based on the Department for Transport's modelled journey times from 2019. A secondary is about 25 minutes on foot, about 10 minutes by car or about 19 minutes by public transport. Mundella Primary School stands out for its history. The footballer and army officer Walter Tull went there when it had an earlier name. The rest of the town's primaries are church, Catholic, community and academy schools spread across Folkestone, Sandgate and Cheriton. That's enough choice that most families aren't stuck with the one closest to them.
Schools are one of Folkestone's real strengths. The standard is high across the county and there are two grammars in town, so the effort goes into securing the place, not hoping the school turns out well.