Good, and largely decided for you before you arrive. One mainstream state secondary serves the area. Eight mainstream state primaries sit around it. There is also an independent sector substantial enough to change what the pavements look like on a weekday morning. The real question here is not which school, it is which system.
Across the eight mainstream state primaries in the area, key stage 2 maths comes in at an average scaled score of about 103. Sherborne Abbey Church of England Primary School and Sherborne Primary School serve the town itself, with the rest scattered through the surrounding villages, so a primary sits roughly 10 minutes' walk from a typical front door on the Department for Transport's modelled journey times. Those times date from 2019 and the roads have not moved since, whatever else has.
The Gryphon School is the single mainstream state secondary in the area, carrying a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of about 47 and sitting about 21 minutes' walk away on the same modelled times. It is a school with an unusually long paper trail: it was formed in 1992 out of the merger of two older grammar schools, one founded for boys in 1640 and one for girls in 1743, together with a third school. Three institutions that spent three centuries not talking to each other now share a single uniform.
Ofsted has published grades for 86 settings across Dorset, which is the whole council area rather than Sherborne alone, and 68 of them are good or better. That is roughly four in five, including two rated outstanding. Seventeen require improvement and one is inadequate. A further 52 settings in the authority carry no published grade at all, which means exactly that and nothing worse.
None of this guarantees a place. Admission runs on the local authority's rules and each school's own oversubscription criteria, and with one state secondary in the area the practical question is whether a specific address falls inside the priority area rather than whether the town does. That gets checked address by address, before you offer, not after. Estate agent particulars have been describing houses as being in a catchment since roughly the invention of the estate agent, and the phrase has never once been binding on anybody.
Then there is the other half of the town. Sherborne School traces its teaching back to King Alfred's time and was refounded in 1550 using the old abbey buildings, and Sherborne School for Girls followed in 1895. A preparatory school and further independents sit close by. Their presence is worth understanding before reading anything into the state numbers, because a share of the town's children are educated entirely outside them, and the intake at the state schools reflects that rather than reflecting the town's full spread.
For a market town of this size, the schooling on offer is one of Sherborne's genuine strengths. The primaries perform, the secondary performs, the authority's inspection record is solid, and the only real complaint is that the state secondary decision makes itself.