Strong, and Surrey sets a high bar to begin with. Nine in ten graded schools in the county are rated good or better. Hersham has three primaries and its own secondary. For most children the walk to primary takes about ten minutes. That leaves Hersham parents free to worry about house prices.
Surrey County Council's area has 159 schools and other settings with a published Ofsted grade, and 147 of them are rated good or outstanding, about nine in every ten. Thirty hold the outstanding grade. At the other end, seven are rated requires improvement and five inadequate, a short tail for a county of that size. Another 194 settings have no published grade yet, either because they are new or because they have not been inspected under the current framework. Their absence from the count tells you nothing about how good they are. All of these figures cover the whole county, so they describe the system a Hersham child joins, and they say nothing yet about which school in it that child will get.
The village has its own primaries. Bell Farm Primary and Burhill Primary both became full primary schools within the last dozen years, Bell Farm in 2014 and Burhill in 2015, and Cardinal Newman Catholic Primary makes the third. Walton Oak and Grovelands are just over the border towards Walton-on-Thames. Places at all of them go by Surrey County Council's published admissions rules, so living near the gate makes a child more likely to get in without making it certain. The council publishes how far away the last child admitted lived in each recent year, and that distance is worth checking against the house you are considering. Families who looked it up talk about their school run. Families who did not talk about their appeal.
The village's own secondary is Three Rivers Academy, and most Hersham families build their plans around it from the day the eldest starts Reception. Heathside Walton-on-Thames is the other nearby secondary, a short trip north. In the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling, the nearest secondary is about 18 minutes' walk or 16 minutes by public transport, against about 11 minutes' walk to the nearest primary. The walk gets longer at eleven, though not by enough for any child to win the argument about getting a lift.
The other schools on the local list cover needs a mainstream classroom may not meet. Walton Leigh School, North East Surrey Secondary Short Stay School and the independent schools nearby give families options a single primary and a single secondary could not. Few families need them, and the ones who do are glad they are close.
Schools are one of Hersham's real strengths. The county system is strong and the village has its own schools at both stages, so the main difficulty for a family is paying for the house near them.