The schools are good, and the odds favour you before you even look at a name. More than nine in ten of the county's graded schools are good or better. The village has its own infant school and its own junior school. A secondary sits close enough that the school run can be done on foot. Here the hard part is getting the place, and the standard of the school is rarely the worry.
Surrey has 147 schools and settings graded good or outstanding by Ofsted out of 159 that hold a published overall grade, a very strong proportion. Thirty of them are outstanding. Seven require improvement and five are inadequate. Another 194 settings across the county have no published grade yet, so they are left out of those counts and should not be read as good or bad. All these figures cover the whole of Surrey, so they describe the county's odds and say nothing about any single classroom in New Haw.
For a village of its size, New Haw does well for names. The Grange Community Infant School takes the youngest children and New Haw Community Junior School takes them on from there, so primary education here comes in two schools and parents get to fill in the application form twice. For secondary, Fullbrook School is the local name, and Chertsey High School and Jubilee High School are also nearby within Runnymede. Places at all of them are handed out under Surrey County Council's published admissions rules, so buying a house near a school gate does not buy a desk inside it, however short the walk looks. Read the council's rules for the junior school as closely as the infant school's, because moving from one to the other is a separate step, and families who assume the second school follows the first sometimes find out otherwise.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which date from 2019, put the nearest primary school about a 14-minute walk from the average New Haw home and the nearest secondary about 22 minutes on foot. By car those drop to about eight and nine minutes. With figures like those, the morning drop-off is one of the few places in Surrey where walking still beats sitting in a queue on the A318.
Schools are one of New Haw's real strengths. Surrey's grades are high, the village has a primary school for both stages and a secondary within walking distance, and families' worries here tend to be about which offer letter arrives.