Melksham's schools are good, and the local-authority grades back that up. More than four in five graded schools across the county are good or better. A handful are outstanding. Only a couple are at the bottom. Parents here spend less time panicking over league tables than parents in most towns, and they spend it on the school run instead.
Ofsted has graded 128 schools and settings across Wiltshire, and 106 of them are good or outstanding, comfortably more than four in five. Six are outstanding, 20 require improvement and two are inadequate. These figures cover the whole local authority, not just Melksham, so they describe the county's schools in general rather than the ones at the end of your road. Another 73 settings have no published grade yet. That doesn't mean they're poor. They simply haven't been graded.
Admission is where parents get caught out. A school's name on an estate agent's listing isn't a place offer, and living near a school doesn't guarantee a seat in it. The council's admissions rules decide who gets in, and they apply to every application the same way. Check the admissions criteria and last year's allocations for the specific school before you pay for a house on the strength of it. Assuming isn't a plan, and the offer letter will say so.
At secondary level, Melksham Oak Community School in Bowerhill is the school most families here end up weighing up. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest secondary about 12 minutes away by car, about 21 by public transport and about 36 on foot. That walk is long enough to build either independence or a lifts rota, depending on the household. For primaries, Aloeric Primary School and Forest and Sandridge Church of England Primary School serve the town itself, and Bowerhill Primary School serves the southern side. The same modelling puts the nearest primary about 11 minutes' walk from the typical home. Families outside the state system have Stonar School, an independent day and boarding school at Atworth. The surrounding villages, including Seend and Broughton Gifford, have their own church primaries, which gives parents on the edge of town more choices than the headline suggests.
Schools are one of Melksham's clear strengths: a county where good is the norm, and walking distances that still suit small legs. The admissions paperwork is the only hard part, and it's hard everywhere.