Stonehouse is a strong place to bring up school-age children, because almost every school around it that holds a grade is rated good or better. The infants and the juniors share a name. The secondary is a short drive or a brisk walk away. Outstanding schools are uncommon, and failing ones are rarer still. What parents get here is reliability, and that turns out to be the thing they actually want.
Gloucestershire as a whole has 136 of its 156 graded schools rated good or better by Ofsted, close to nine in every ten. Nine are outstanding, 19 require improvement and one is inadequate, and a further 95 settings have no published grade yet, which tells you nothing either way. Those are county-wide counts, covering Cheltenham, the Forest of Dean and everywhere in between, so they describe the system Stonehouse feeds into more than the schools at the end of its own streets.
Inside the town, primary schooling comes in two parts: Stonehouse Park Infant School and then Park Junior School, which makes the move at seven about as gentle as a change of school can be. The villages this page also covers have their own primaries, among them King's Stanley CofE Primary School, Leonard Stanley Church of England Primary School and Eastington Primary School, and the newer housing to the north is served by Great Oldbury Primary Academy. The county council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so living within sight of a school gate gives you a better chance of a place but no promise of one, and the nearest primary is never yours by right. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 13 minutes' walk from a typical home, or eight minutes by car. Most of the town reaches a primary on foot, which spares the parents one of the worst parts of the day.
Maidenhill School is the nearest secondary, and in the same 2019 modelling a typical home is about 22 minutes' walk from a secondary school, 15 by public transport or nine by car. The 2019 bus timings have had years to change, and in this valley bus services have rarely changed for the better. Look up the distance at which the last child was offered a place at Maidenhill in the county council's allocation figures for recent years, because that number tells you more about your chances than any grade does. Wycliffe College is also in the area for families looking beyond the state system.
The infant and junior schools sharing a name looks like a lack of imagination, but Stonehouse has done the same with its town name since 1086, when the manor got called a stone house for being one, and that has worked out fine for nine centuries.
Schools are one of the best things about Stonehouse: a county system that delivers good schools reliably, and a town small enough that most of them are a walk away.