Hemel Hempstead's schools are one of the best things about the town. The primaries do well in maths. Across the county, nearly nine in ten graded schools are rated good or better. The secondaries are close enough to walk to, just about. Families who come for the semi with a garden tend to find the schools were the better buy.
There are 32 state primary schools in and around the town, and their pupils average about 104 in the Key Stage 2 maths test, comfortably above the expected standard. They are spread right across the town, from Boxmoor Primary School in the old valley suburb to Galley Hill Primary School and Nursery up on the northern estates, and the Department for Transport's modelled times, from 2019, put the walk to the nearest primary at about eight minutes. Back in 2006 the education authority decided Hemel had too many primary places and proposed merging or closing schools. A new town built for young families ran out of young families before it ran out of classrooms.
At secondary level there are six state schools in the area, with a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of about 43. That figure is respectable without being remarkable, a long way short of the primaries' showing. Among them are The Hemel Hempstead School, Longdean School and The Adeyfield Academy, the last of these in the neighbourhood where the new town laid its first houses. The same 2019 modelling puts the nearest secondary about 19 minutes away on foot, 15 by public transport and nine by car. That longer walk at eleven is when a lot of Hemel parents start doing the school run by car.
Hertfordshire County Council's schools, inspected across the whole county, hold 203 good-or-better grades out of 227 graded settings, roughly nine in every ten. Forty are rated outstanding, 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. Places are handed out under the county council's published admissions rules, so living two streets from a school gets a family onto the list and nothing more. The useful check is the county council's allocation records for the specific school, which show how far from the gate the last child offered a place lived in recent years. Those county-wide grades describe the system Hemel children are educated in, and they are strong ones.
Schools are one of Hemel's real strengths. The primaries carry most of that, the secondaries are decent and close by, and the county's inspection record backs both up.