The schools are the best thing about Radstock, and almost nobody moves here for them. All but two of the graded settings in the wider council area come out good or better. Four are outstanding. The town's own secondary keeps an orchid collection second only to Kew's, which is not the hobby you would predict from a place that spent two centuries hauling coal. People buy here for the price and inherit the schools by accident.
Primary provision is solid rather than spectacular, which for most families is the more useful thing to be. Across the 16 mainstream state primaries in the area, key stage two maths comes in at an average scaled score of about 105. In the town itself Trinity Church School and Saint Mary's Church of England Primary School sit within the built-up area, and there are more in the villages and neighbouring parishes that ring it. Fosse Way School, over in Westfield, takes pupils with complex learning difficulties and serves a much wider catchment than this postal district.
Secondary is where the numbers get interesting. The four mainstream state secondaries in the area post a pupil-weighted attainment eight score of about 46. Writhlington School is the one in Radstock, a comprehensive taking pupils from eleven through sixth form, with specialist status as a business and enterprise college and a national enterprise award from 2006 to go with the greenhouse full of orchids. Norton Hill Academy sits just up the road and pulls in a good share of families from this side of the coalfield. Between them, the secondary choice here is a genuine choice rather than a single door with a queue behind it.
Ofsted has graded 41 settings across Bath and North East Somerset, of which 39 are good or better. That is nineteen in every twenty, and it includes four rated outstanding against one requiring improvement and one judged inadequate. Those counts cover the whole authority rather than this town alone, so they describe the pool a Radstock family draws from rather than the streets immediately around them. A further 28 settings hold no published grade yet, which means they have not been inspected under the current framework, not that anything is wrong with them.
The usual warning applies with more force than usual here. Naming a school is not the same as getting into it. Admissions run through the local authority on its own criteria, oversubscribed schools fill up from closest to furthest, and church schools apply faith criteria on top of distance. Buying a house because it sits near a particular set of gates buys you proximity and nothing more binding than that. Anyone treating a postcode as a guarantee should ring the admissions team before they ring the estate agent, because the letter arrives in spring and the mortgage does not care how disappointed you are.
The rest of the provision is unremarkable in the way that good provision usually is. A spread of church primaries and community schools across the surrounding villages, further education in the next parish, and enough capacity that the local conversation is about which school rather than whether there is one.
Education is the quiet triumph of a town that lost its industry and never quite replaced it. Radstock cannot get you to a railway station and cannot pretend to be pretty, but it can get your children into a good school without a bidding war over a catchment, and that is a rarer thing than the house prices here suggest.