Sawbridgeworth's schools are strong, and the county around them is stronger still. About nine in ten graded schools across Hertfordshire are rated good or better. The town has its own secondary, two primaries and an infant school, so most children can go all the way through school without leaving town. The oldest of them was paid for by beer money. Few market towns this size can say all of that.
Ofsted has graded 227 schools and settings across Hertfordshire, and 203 of them are rated good or outstanding, nearly nine in ten. Of the rest, 40 are outstanding, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Those are county-wide numbers. A further 226 settings in the county have no published grade yet, and they are left out of the count completely, since a missing grade says nothing either way. A county of that size with only 3 inadequate schools leaves parents very little to complain about, though they usually manage.
In Sawbridgeworth itself, the secondary is Leventhorpe, which also takes children from the villages around. The primary years are split between Mandeville Primary School, Reedings Junior School and Fawbert and Barnard Infants' School, with High Wych Church of England Primary School just outside town. Places at all of them are allocated under Hertfordshire County Council's published admissions rules, so owning a house round the corner from one of them does not get your child in. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times from 2019 put the nearest primary at about a nine-minute walk on average and the nearest secondary at about 18 minutes. A ten-minute walk to school is something a parent can live with on a wet morning. Twenty minutes is the point where a teenager starts asking for a lift.
Fawbert and Barnard is the school with the backstory. In 1839 two maltsters, George Fawbert and John Barnard, set up a charity to fund local children and their education, and the infant school it paid for is still teaching. The malting trade has long since gone from Sawbridgeworth, and this school is still here. Leventhorpe ran a public swimming pool and leisure centre until it closed at the end of 2024, so any memories of the town swimming there are out of date.
Hertfordshire publishes each school's admissions criteria every year. Read the criteria for the school you want, alongside the rules for the oversubscribed year groups, while you are still looking at houses. Moving after the deadline has passed won't help. Being near a school matters most to the people who checked how the council measures "near".
The schools are one of Sawbridgeworth's real strengths. The town has the full set from infants to sixth form age, in a county where almost every graded school is good or better.