The schools around Old Basing are the easy part of moving here. Nearly nine in ten graded schools in the county are good or better. Inadequate ones are rare. The village has its own infant school. The hard part is the admissions letter, which reads your address more carefully than any estate agent will.
Ofsted has graded 211 schools and settings across Hampshire, and 185 of them are good or outstanding, close to nine in every ten. That count covers the whole local authority, not only Old Basing, so it describes the county system a family here buys into rather than the gates at the end of the road. Within it, 27 are rated outstanding, 16 requires improvement and 10 inadequate. Another 226 settings hold no published overall grade yet and sit outside those figures entirely. Hampshire parents tend to treat a good rating as the baseline, and the numbers let them.
The school most buyers will ask about first is Old Basing Infant School, the one carrying the village's name and the one parents will walk to. Beyond the village, the brief's list of nearby primaries includes Marnel Community Infant School and Marnel Junior School, and Merton Infant School and Nursery with Merton Junior School, so the paired infant-then-junior arrangement is common locally. For secondary, Everest Community Academy is the one on the nearby list. The rest of the local primaries are a mix of community, church and academy schools, which gives parents choices on paper and a fair amount of form-filling in practice.
None of that guarantees a place. Buying a house near a named school does not buy admission, because the council's allocation rules decide, and those rules don't care what the listing said about being "in catchment". Check the current admission arrangements for the specific school and year before an offer, not after. The families who skip this step tend to find out in April, when the council's letter arrives and doesn't mention the school they paid extra to live near.
Schools are one of Old Basing's real strengths: a county system where good is normal and failing is uncommon, with a village infant school on the doorstep. Buyers should put the energy they'd spend worrying about quality into reading the admissions criteria instead.