Kidlington's schools are good, and parents arriving here usually find more choice at primary age than they planned for. Primary maths results are solid. Almost every child moves on to the same secondary at eleven. Nearly nine in ten of the county's graded schools are rated good or better. The choice is real at five, and by eleven it has mostly been made for you.
There are nine state primaries around here, and their pupils average a scaled score of 105 in the Key Stage 2 maths tests. North Kidlington Primary and West Kidlington Primary and Nursery each serve their own side of the place, and St Thomas More Catholic Primary is an option for families who want a faith school. Edward Feild Primary completes the Kidlington set. Nine primaries is a lot of nativity plays for a place that spent most of the last century insisting it was a village.
Secondary is simpler. Gosford Hill School is the one mainstream state secondary in the area, and its pupils post an Attainment 8 score of about 45. One school means no league tables to agonise over, no prospectus evenings to compare and no second choice to wonder about. Most families find the eleven-plus question gets settled for them by the map.
Oxfordshire County Council's area has 121 schools and settings with a published Ofsted grade, and 108 of them are rated good or outstanding, almost nine in every ten. Eleven of those are outstanding, while 10 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Many more settings in the county have no published grade yet and are left out of those numbers. These are county-wide counts, which tell you the standard local schools are held to without telling you anything about a particular classroom in Kidlington.
Places are given out under the council's published admissions rules, so a house round the corner from North Kidlington Primary gives you a better chance of a place there without promising one, and Oxfordshire publishes how far from each school the last successful applicants lived. Look up that distance for the primary you want, and do it while you are still choosing between houses. Parents who skip that step and assume the school at the end of the road belongs to them tend to find out otherwise when offers come out in April, and the playground hears about it for weeks afterwards.
Schools are one of Kidlington's real strengths: there is a good spread of primaries, a single secondary every family will get to know, and a county where good is the normal grade.