Kempston's schools are one of the best reasons to buy here. Nearly every graded school in the surrounding borough is good or better. The town has two secondaries of its own. Most families can walk to a primary in a few minutes. Where the trouble starts is the admissions letter.
Across Bedford Borough, Ofsted has graded 39 schools and rated 36 of them good or outstanding, which is better than nine in ten. Two are outstanding, 34 are good and three require improvement, and none in the borough is rated inadequate. Another 24 settings have no published grade yet. So the borough's schools are solid, with a lot of good and very little that would worry anyone.
The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about 8 minutes' walk from the typical Kempston home. In town that means schools like Camestone School, and out in the rural parish towards Church End, Kempston Rural Primary School. Bedford Borough Council hands out places by its published admissions rules, so living close to a school you like doesn't mean your child gets in. Look up how far from the gate the last child offered a place at that school lived in recent years, and compare it with the house you are viewing. Parents here learn the allocation rules quickly, and the ones who learned them after exchanging tend to remember the order they did it in.
Secondary is where Kempston does better than many towns its size. Kempston Academy and Daubeney Academy are both in town, and the same 2019 model puts the nearest secondary about 14 minutes' walk away, or about 12 by public transport. For most children here, Year 7 means a new uniform and a slightly longer walk.
Kempston is also home to special schools that take pupils from all over Bedford Borough, Ridgeway School among them. Families from right across the borough send their children here, which means Kempston is part of the borough's education plan as well as its commuter belt.
Schools won't be what puts a family off Kempston. If anything is going to cost a family sleep, it is the wait to find out which school offered the place.