Schools are the best thing Salisbury has going, and it is not a close contest. The only two grammar schools in the whole county are here. Across Wiltshire, more than eight in ten graded schools come out good or better. Primary results hold up and the secondary numbers do too. This is the part of the city that gets into the first line of the estate agent's listing, and for once that is fair.
There are 22 mainstream state primaries in the area, and key stage 2 maths across them averages a scaled score of 105. That is a solid, unglamorous number spread across a lot of small schools, which is what happens when a city is really a market town with villages hanging off it. Old Sarum Primary School takes its name from an Iron Age hillfort that the Saxons abandoned and the Normans built a castle on, which is a considerable amount of history to print on a jumper.
At secondary level there are 6 mainstream state schools in the area, with Attainment 8 averaging 52. The complication behind that average is selection. Salisbury holds Bishop Wordsworth's Church of England Grammar School and South Wilts Grammar School, historically boys' and girls' respectively, both running mixed sixth forms since 2020, and both drawing from well beyond the city because there is nowhere else in Wiltshire to go. Sarum Academy takes the non-selective intake and teaches the pupils the grammar system did not take. If you want a single sentence on how the city works, that is it. Salisbury Cathedral School sits in the independent column for anyone whose budget stretches to it.
Ofsted has published grades for 128 settings across Wiltshire as a whole, not just Salisbury, and 106 of them are good or better. Six are outstanding, 20 require improvement, and 2 are inadequate. A further 73 settings hold no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than anything worse. The county-wide framing matters: a good picture across Wiltshire is not a guarantee about the school at the end of your street.
Which brings up the thing every parent finds out the hard way. Living near a school named in this answer buys you proximity and nothing else. The grammar schools select, so the address is irrelevant to whether your child gets in. The rest allocate on their own published rules, and those rules do not care that you paid a premium to be near the gates. Check the admissions criteria for the specific school and the specific year before you make an offer on a house, because the offer letter arrives in spring and by then the decision is somebody else's.
For a city this size, the schooling is one of Salisbury's genuine strengths, and the reason a good number of families are here at all rather than somewhere with a shorter commute.