Oxford's state schools are strong, and the famous university has almost nothing to do with it. About nine in ten graded schools around the county are good or better. Primary maths scores are solid. Seven state secondaries take the older children. Here the dons are the background and the classroom teachers do the work.
The 39 mainstream state primaries in the Oxford area average a Key Stage 2 maths score of about 105, the scaled score children get at the end of Year 6. It is a sound result spread across very different neighbourhoods, from Wolvercote Primary School on the northern edge of the city to Rose Hill Primary School in the south. Living next to the University of Oxford improves a child's ability to spell "Oxford" and very little else, so the primaries have earned that number themselves.
The seven mainstream state secondaries in the area average an Attainment 8 score of about 48, weighted by pupil numbers. Attainment 8 adds up a pupil's results across eight GCSE-level subjects, so it rewards breadth as well as the top grades. The Cherwell School in the north of the city is one of the seven. Families who want to pay have options too, from the Dragon School to Magdalen College School, and some do. For everyone else, the state system handles it.
Of the 121 schools and settings with a published grade across Oxfordshire as a whole, Ofsted rates 108 as good or outstanding, so roughly nine in ten. Eleven of those are outstanding, 10 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Another 151 settings across the county have no published grade yet, which means they have not been graded, and says nothing about whether they are any good. Because these are county numbers, a buyer in Headington or Blackbird Leys is reading Banbury's schools into the same total.
School places in Oxford come from the county council's published admissions rules, so buying a house near a school you like does not get your child a place there. Oversubscription criteria, sibling links and distance measured the council's way all count, and church schools often add their own faith-based rules on top. Ask the county council how far the last child admitted to your preferred primary lived last year, because that figure changes from year to year and nothing on the house's particulars will give it to you. Parents who pick a house by the sign on the school gate tend to discover the admissions criteria the following spring.
Schools are one of Oxford's real strengths: steady primaries, a sound secondary picture and a county record that very few parents will need to worry about.