Good, and in Kent "good" comes with an entrance exam attached. Nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The primaries around here beat the expected standard in maths. There are two grammar schools in town, one for boys and one for girls. Getting a child into a good school is the easy part here. Getting them into a grammar school is where families start losing sleep.
The primary picture is solid. There are 12 mainstream state primaries in the area, and their children average a scaled score of 104 in the end-of-primary maths test, which puts them above the expected level. That doesn't make it a hothouse. It makes it a town where the basics get taught properly, which is all most parents at the gate were hoping for. Kemsley Primary Academy and Milton Court Primary Academy serve two of the neighbourhoods this page covers. The village primaries dotted around the edge of town give families a smaller alternative if they're willing to drive. The modelled walk to the nearest primary is about nine minutes, based on 2019 journey times, so the school run on foot is realistic for most households.
The Ofsted figures cover the whole of Kent, not just Sittingbourne, so read them as the county's standard. Ofsted has graded 221 of 245 rated settings good or better, which is about nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. Another 21 require improvement and three are inadequate, which is a small tail but a real one, and it's worth checking the latest report for any school on your shortlist rather than relying on the county average. Plenty of other settings hold no published grade yet. That tells you nothing about them either way.
At secondary level the town runs on selection. Borden Grammar School takes boys and Highsted Grammar School takes girls, and a place at either depends on the Kent Test, the county's eleven-plus. Fulston Manor School is one of the non-selective secondaries serving the rest of the town. The modelled walk to the nearest secondary is about 23 minutes, or about ten by car, on the same 2019 journey times. So a lot of teenagers here either walk a fair way or get driven, and the driven ones still complain about it.
None of this guarantees a place. Living near a named school doesn't secure admission, and the grammar schools add a test result on top of whatever the admissions rules say. Before you buy, check the admissions criteria for the specific schools you want and look at how places were allocated in recent years. Estate agents will happily describe any house as "close to the grammar schools". The admissions office doesn't care how close you are if the test result isn't there.
Schools are Sittingbourne's strongest suit, with good primaries and a secondary system where a clever child has two grammar schools in reach. The only real catch is the test, and it catches every family in Kent the same way.