The schools around Hertford Heath are strong, and the county's record backs that up. About nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The village has its own primary, about ten minutes' walk from the average front door. The secondaries are in Hertford, so a teenager here needs a bus or a parent with a car. The best-known school in the village is a boarding school that most village families will never apply to.
Hertfordshire's local schools have 203 of 227 graded settings rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, close to nine in ten. Forty of those are outstanding, 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 226 settings in the county have no published grade yet, and they are left out of those numbers entirely. These are county-wide counts covering every graded setting from Royston to the Hertfordshire edge of London, so they describe the county you are moving into more than the two or three schools your child will actually attend.
The village's own school is Hertford Heath Primary and Nursery School. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 11 minutes' walk from the average home, or about nine minutes by car or bus. For a family with young children, that is the walk you will do twice a day for seven years. Places are allocated by Hertfordshire County Council under its published admissions rules, so living near the gate makes a place likely and does not secure one. The rules for the year your child starts are on the council's admissions pages, and they are the document to read, ahead of any opinion of the school from someone at a barbecue. Families who want something else in reach can look at Morgans Primary School and Nursery, or the primary end of Simon Balle All-Through School, both in the Hertford direction.
Secondary is where the village runs out of road. The same 2019 modelling puts the nearest secondary about 37 minutes' walk away, 21 minutes by public transport or 11 by car. That means Hertford, where Richard Hale School and Simon Balle All-Through School take secondary pupils, and both admit under the same county rules. Simon Balle runs from the start of primary through to the end of secondary, which lets a family avoid choosing a second school at eleven, provided they won a place at four. Parents in Hertford Heath plan the secondary years around a car, a bus timetable and whichever of those two Hertford schools the admissions process gives them.
Haileybury College is a boarding school, the largest institution in the village, and for most families who live there its main effect is traffic at the start and end of term. Its pupils make up a large share of the village's teenagers in the census, and very few of them were born on the heath. Living next door to a famous school does nothing for your children's school applications except make the school run longer.
The schools are one of Hertford Heath's real strengths: a village primary close enough to walk to and a county where good is the normal grade, so the hard work is getting a place in Hertford at eleven.