Maidenhead's schools are the town's best-kept institution. Four in five graded schools are good or better. Primary maths results come in strong. Six state secondaries share the town, with a girls' school among them. The parts of Maidenhead that wear a uniform have held their standards better than the High Street.
There are 17 mainstream state primaries in the area, and their average maths score at the end of primary school is about 106. Boyne Hill CofE Infant and Nursery School takes its name from the same hill as All Saints' Church, which G. E. Street finished in 1857, and the two have been teaching and preaching within sight of each other since. Larchfield Primary and Nursery School is another of the town's options, and the rest are spread across the suburbs from Furze Platt to Cox Green. The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about a ten-minute walk away on average. For most families the school run is short enough to do on foot, and that is the version of Maidenhead they tend to describe to friends.
The six mainstream state secondaries in the area have an average Attainment 8 score of about 48, weighted by pupil numbers. Furze Platt Senior School and Desborough College are among them, and Newlands Girls' School is the single-sex option. The same 2019 model has the nearest secondary about 19 minutes' walk away on average. Newlands rules out every boy in town before anyone has measured a distance.
Ofsted has graded 25 schools and settings across the Windsor and Maidenhead council area, and 21 of them are good or outstanding, which is better than four in five. Two are outstanding. Three require improvement and one is inadequate. Another 32 settings across the borough have no published grade yet. The two outstanding schools come up at the school gate far more often than the 19 that are good, which is how parents turn a strong set of results into a competition.
Places are handed out by the council's published admissions rules, and living near a school does not by itself secure a place there. The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead publishes those rules for each school, along with how far the last child admitted lived in recent years, and those are worth reading for any school a move depends on. Faith schools such as the Church of England primaries have their own criteria on top. Parents who buy within sight of the gates and skip the small print are the ones who learn the admissions rules the hard way.
Schools are one of Maidenhead's real strengths, strong at primary, solid at secondary and graded well across the borough. Families can move here for the schools without having to fight the system for every place.