The schools are one of Hazlemere's real strengths. Most of the schools across the county are rated good or better. Primary school is a short walk for most families, and secondary school a slightly longer one. There's even a secondary school named after a local Nobel prize winner. Choosing the school is the easy part here, and getting a place is harder.
Ofsted has graded 94 schools in Buckinghamshire, and 80 of them are good or outstanding, which is more than four in five. Nineteen are outstanding. Eleven require improvement and three are inadequate. These are county-wide counts covering a large area, so they describe the system Hazlemere's children go through, and they say nothing about which of those 94 is down the road. Settings that haven't yet had a published grade are left out of the count.
The local names say a lot about the place. Hazlemere Church of England Combined School carries the village name. Manor Farm Community Infant School and Manor Farm Junior School share their name with one of the farms covered by houses in the 1960s and 1970s, so they're probably about as old as the estates around them. For secondary school, Sir William Ramsay School is named after the chemist who lived in Hazlemere until his death in 1916. Holmer Green Senior School is the name next door, and The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe is the name that comes up at dinner parties.
Distances are friendly by commuter-belt standards. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary school about 10 minutes' walk from the typical home, and the nearest secondary about 20 minutes on foot or about 9 minutes by car. Getting a place is another question. Buckinghamshire Council allocates school places using its published admissions rules, and living near a school doesn't guarantee a place there, however close the house is. Read the council's admissions criteria for each school you're counting on, and look at how far the last child admitted lived, not just the Ofsted grade on the gate. A listing that says "walking distance to the school" tells you how long the walk is and nothing about whether your child would get in.
The schools are the best part of the place. Parents here tend to worry more about the admissions rules than about the quality of the schools.