Loughton's schools are one of the better reasons to pay its house prices. The local primaries post strong maths results, and the secondaries score well on the results at sixteen. Across the county, nearly nine in ten graded schools are good or better. The weak spot is getting a place at the school you picked.
Around here, six mainstream state primaries averaged about 108 on the Key Stage 2 maths score. Staples Road Primary School carries the name of one of the town's conservation areas, and the Alderton schools split the job in two, with The Alderton Infant School and Nursery handing children on to The Alderton Junior School. Thomas Willingale Primary School and Nursery completes a set of local primaries named after the town's roads and its history.
The three mainstream state secondaries in the area averaged about 60 on the Attainment 8 measure, which weights each school's result by how many pupils took the exams. Davenant Foundation School has always had a sixth form. The town's other two secondaries added theirs in 2015 and 2017, so a Loughton teenager no longer has to leave town at sixteen to stay in school. Roding Valley High School also takes pupils from Buckhurst Hill, which has no state secondary of its own. Debden Park High School serves the estate side of town. A Year 7 place here is contested by more than one parish.
Ofsted's grades are counted across the whole of Essex, where 218 of the 246 settings with a published grade are good or outstanding. That is nearly nine in ten. Of those, 22 are outstanding, while 23 require improvement and 5 are inadequate. Settings that have not yet been graded are left out of the count altogether.
Places are allocated under Essex County Council's published admissions rules, so living close to a school you like does not secure a place there, and a house near Staples Road can still produce an offer letter from somewhere else. The council's admissions booklet for the school you want, read before the house hunt instead of after the offer, will save some arguments. Parents who assumed the nearest gate was theirs are the ones refreshing the council's website on offer day.
Loughton's schools are a real strength, strong at primary and solid at sixteen. The only part a buyer has to work at is the admissions process.