Newent's schools are good, and a child can go from infants to sixth form without leaving town. The county around it has one of the stronger inspection records going. Nearly nine in ten graded schools are good or better. The infant and junior schools are run together. The secondary has a sixth form attached, so the school run never has to leave town.
Gloucestershire County Council's area has 156 schools with a published Ofsted grade, and 136 of them, nearly nine in ten, are rated good or outstanding. Nine are outstanding. At the other end, 19 require improvement and one is inadequate. Another 95 settings have no published grade yet, which means nobody has inspected them and is no comment on how good they are. Those are county-wide numbers covering everything from Tewkesbury to the Severn, and they tell a Newent parent how Gloucestershire runs its schools in general, not how any one Newent classroom is doing.
Primary-age children in town go to Glebe Infants' School and then Picklenash Junior School, which are federated and share one leadership. Changing school at seven, between two schools under the same management, is a gentler move than most children get. Places at both, and at every school here, are allocated under Gloucestershire's published admissions rules, so buying a house within sight of the gates does not secure a place, however the particulars word it. The village schools nearby, Ann Cam Church of England Primary School and Pauntley Church of England Primary School, give families on the rural edge, out towards Dymock and Upleadon, a primary without driving into town. Look up the latest Ofsted report for the specific school you're counting on, and read the date on it as carefully as the grade, because a county average can't tell you what was found at one small school last time an inspector visited.
At eleven, children move to Newent Community School and Sixth Form Centre, the only secondary in town, and can stay there until they finish sixth form. In a town this size, the sixth form spares a sixteen-year-old a daily bus to Gloucester, and that matters a great deal in a place where the bus runs less often than the school bell. The arrangement also means a family that moves here when the eldest is five can, in theory, stop thinking about schools for thirteen years. Parents who spend the summer before Year 6 comparing secondary prospectuses usually find there was only ever one to compare.
Schools are one of Newent's real strengths. The county's inspection record is strong, and the town's own schools take a child from four to eighteen without a change of postcode.