Good, and unusually easy to get to. One secondary serves the town. The primaries run on the old infant-then-junior split rather than a single all-through school. Across the county, close to nine in ten graded schools hold a good or better rating. For a town this size, having the whole education pipeline inside the road network is the part that actually changes daily life.
Ofsted has graded 211 settings across Hampshire, the local authority New Milton sits in, and 185 of them are good or better. That is roughly nine in ten. Twenty-seven carry an outstanding grade, 16 require improvement, and 10 are rated inadequate. Those counts cover the whole county rather than this town alone, so treat them as the weather rather than the forecast: they tell you the system a New Milton family is buying into is functioning, not which classroom their child ends up in. A further 226 settings have no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected under the current arrangements, not judged and found wanting.
The usual warning applies with more force here than most people expect. Living near a school is not the same as being offered a place at it. Admissions run on the local authority's oversubscription rules rather than on the estate agent's use of the word catchment, and the rules are honest without being generous. Anyone buying a specific house for a specific school gate should read that school's own admissions arrangements for the year their child starts, not the year they are viewing.
New Milton Infant School and New Milton Junior School carry the town's name and run the standard two-stage journey, with a second infant and junior pair over on the Ashley side. The practical consequence catches incomers out: your child changes school in the middle of primary, which means two sets of gates, two sets of parents to get to know, and one transfer year that families arriving from an all-through primary somewhere else have never had to think about. Locals do not consider this remarkable because nobody here has done it any other way.
The Arnewood School is the secondary, and it is the one that matters most to anyone buying with a ten-year-old in tow, because it is where the great majority of the town's children go next. Sixth form is the point at which the town stops being self-contained: colleges sit outside it, which for most sixteen-year-olds means a bus, a lift, or a driving licence sooner than their parents planned. Ballard School provides the independent alternative for families who want it, with a small number of other independent options nearby.
What all this adds up to is a town where the school run is short, the choices are legible, and the child can plausibly walk to at least one stage of their own education. That is worth more than it sounds. In plenty of places on this coast, getting a child to a decent school involves a car, a queue, and a conversation about which side of an invisible line your front door falls on. Here the invisible lines are fewer and the schools are closer together.
The schools are the strongest single reason a family would choose New Milton over the villages around it, and the town knows it. Buy here with children and you are buying a system that mostly works, which is a lower bar than it should be and a bar that a great many places still fail to clear.