The schools in St Albans are strong at both ages, and parents pay for them in the house price whether they admit it or not. The primaries do well in the end-of-primary tests. The secondaries keep that up at sixteen. Most schools in the county have a good grade or better. The people with the least to say about it are the ones who already got the place they wanted.
Around here there are 41 mainstream state primaries, and their pupils average about 108 in the end-of-primary maths test, comfortably above the expected standard. The names run from the old to the very recent. Fleetville Junior School serves the terraces east of the centre. Alban City School took over the refurbished former University of Hertfordshire law school on Hatfield Road and began taking reception children in 2012. The law students moved out to Hatfield, and four-year-olds moved into the lecture rooms, which may be the most St Albans swap ever recorded.
There are 12 mainstream state secondaries in the area, and their pupils average about 58 on the Attainment 8 measure, which scores a pupil's best eight GCSE results. Katherine Warington School is the newest name on the list, and Townsend Church of England School and Loreto College are long-standing ones. The independent sector adds St Albans School for anyone with the fees to go with the mortgage. By the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling, the nearest secondary is about a 15-minute walk away on average, and the nearest primary about nine. For most families the school run is a walk, and for some it is a status symbol they walk at a showy pace.
Ofsted's grades for Hertfordshire as a whole put 203 of the 227 graded settings at good or outstanding, close to nine in ten. Of those, 40 are outstanding, while 21 require improvement and three are rated inadequate. Another 226 settings across the county have no published grade yet, and that tells a parent nothing either way. The county figure covers everywhere from Watford to the villages, so it is a backdrop and says little about the school at the end of any one road.
Places are allocated under Hertfordshire County Council's published admissions rules, and a house near Fleetville or Katherine Warington buys you a position on a list, which is all it buys. The council publishes how far from each school the last place went in recent years, and that is the one document worth reading before the survey report. Parents here tend to discover their views on faith schools, distance criteria and sibling rules at roughly the speed their eldest approaches Year 6.
St Albans has a school list most commuter cities would envy, and it is one of the real reasons people move here.