High Wycombe's schools are strong, and the system around them is unusually demanding. Most schools with an inspection grade are good or better. Nineteen are outstanding. Buckinghamshire still runs the eleven-plus. Here the exam that matters most to a family is sat by its youngest member.
Ofsted has graded 94 schools across Buckinghamshire, the authority that covers High Wycombe, and 80 of them are good or better, which is close to nine in ten. Nineteen are rated outstanding and 61 good. Eleven require improvement and three are inadequate. Another 94 settings have no published grade yet, and they sit outside those totals because they have not been inspected under the current grade.
Buckinghamshire is one of the few counties to have kept the old selective system. Children take the eleven-plus in their last year of primary school, and the result decides whether they go to a grammar school or a secondary modern. The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe and John Hampden Grammar School are the two grammar names in the town. Wycombe High School, Cressex Community School and The Highcrest Academy are among the other secondaries. Places are allocated under Buckinghamshire Council's published admissions rules, so a house near a school gate does not secure a place inside it. For the grammars, distance only comes into it once the exam has been passed. Plenty of parents treat Year 5 as their own revision year.
Primary schools come up often across the town, from The Disraeli School to Highworth Combined School and Nursery and Booker Hill Primary School & Nursery out on the western edge. The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about nine minutes' walk from the typical home. The nearest secondary is about 26 minutes on foot or 20 by public transport. That model is a few years old, and bus times date faster than walking times.
Wycombe Abbey is the other famous name, and its main building is listed. During the Second World War the United States Army Air Forces ran their bomber headquarters from a former girls' school in the town. That is still the most dramatic thing to have happened in a High Wycombe classroom. Buckinghamshire New University has its main campus in the town centre, on the site of the town's former art and technology college, so the town has education beyond the age of eighteen as well.
Schooling is one of High Wycombe's real strengths: the grades are high, the choice is wide, and the selective system means a family's main worry is the exam.