Good, and simple to choose between, because there aren't many. The town has two primaries and a single secondary. Across the county, the great majority of graded schools are good or better. The nearest primary is a short walk for most families. Choice is thin, and quality isn't the problem.
Ofsted has graded 106 of 128 schools across Wiltshire as good or better, which is a little over four in five. Six of those are outstanding. Twenty require improvement and two are inadequate. These counts cover the whole local authority, not only Malmesbury, so they tell you the standard of the neighbourhood the town sits in, not the grade of the school at the end of your road. Another 73 settings in the county have no published grade yet. That means not yet inspected, not quietly failing, and nobody should read anything into it.
Inside the town the line-up is short. Malmesbury Church of England Primary School and St Joseph's Catholic Primary School cover the younger years, and Malmesbury School is the secondary. Villages on this page have their own primaries: Sherston CofE Primary School to the west, Crudwell CofE Primary School to the north, and Minety Church of England Primary School on the Swindon side, which is a real advantage if you buy out of town and would rather not run the morning drive up the hill. Several of these carry a church name, so read each one's admissions policy before you assume the nearest door is yours.
Distance works in the town's favour. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 15 minutes' walk or 7 minutes' drive from the average home. The nearest secondary is about 27 minutes on foot, 10 by car or 14 by public transport. Those bus times are the ones most likely to have aged. For the teenager, the walk to the one secondary is realistic, and the lift to school stops being a parental career by about year eight.
None of this guarantees a place. A school carrying the town's name is not a promise, and buying the house nearest the gates does not buy the seat inside them. Admissions run on the council's rules and each school's own policy, faith criteria included where they apply, and the buyer who skips that reading finds out in the spring with everyone else. Check the current Ofsted report and the admissions criteria for the specific school before the offer, not after.
Learning here has a long pedigree. The Anglo-Saxon monastery on the hilltop was famed as a centre of learning, and its first abbot, St Aldhelm, built the first church organ in England, so the bar for the school music concert was set some time ago. The newer arrival is the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, a higher education institution set up on the company's campus in 2017, which means the town now has somewhere to study after school as well as somewhere to go before it.
One nearby school has closed, so if an old listing names a school that isn't among those above, check it still exists before counting it as an option.
Malmesbury gives you one secondary, a pair of town primaries and a county where most schools are good, with walkable distances to match. For a family, the schools are one of its real strengths, provided you do the admissions homework before you do the viewing.