Good, and the county's inspectors mostly agree. Nine in ten graded schools in the county come out good or better. Two secondaries sit inside a small town. The primary walk takes about a quarter of an hour. For a town this size, the choice is the surprise, and it's a pleasant one.
Start with the Ofsted picture, and note the scale. These counts cover every graded school in Kent, not only Sandwich. Ofsted has rated 221 of Kent's 245 graded schools good or better, about nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. At the other end, 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. Another 255 settings have no published grade yet, which means only that they haven't been inspected or graded. It says nothing about how good they are. So the county baseline is strong, and a Sandwich parent starts from a good position before looking at any single school.
Locally, the primary years split in an old-fashioned way. Sandwich Infant School takes the youngest children and Sandwich Junior School takes them on, so families get two sets of school gates and two sets of parents' evenings before secondary. Eastry Church of England Primary School serves the village side of the area. The Department for Transport's modelled times from 2019 put the average home about 13 minutes' walk, or 8 minutes by car, from a primary school. Plenty of parents will still drive it, and the Guildhall's square at drop-off time will show you which ones.
Secondary is where Sandwich is unusual. Sir Roger Manwood's School and Sandwich Technology School both sit in the immediate area, so a town known for medieval gates and a championship golf course also has two secondaries. The average home is about 25 minutes' walk from a secondary, 9 minutes by car and about 20 minutes by public transport, on those same 2019 modelled times. The public transport figure ages worst as bus services change, so check the current timetable against the actual school run before trusting it. The area also has specialist provision, which families with those needs will want to discuss directly with the county.
None of this tells you which school your child will get. A school near your house isn't a place for your child. Admissions follow the council's criteria, which can sound neutral and still leave you surprised, and the families who buy the house before reading the admissions rules are the ones who find out in spring. Check the published criteria for the specific school, and the last few years of allocations, before you check the paint colours. The only grades that matter are the ones on each school's own current Ofsted report, not the county average.
Schools are one of Sandwich's real strengths: a county where good is the norm, and a small town that still has both halves of the school journey on its own doorstep. Read the admissions rules as carefully as the Ofsted reports, and the rest follows.