Stow-on-the-Wold's schools are good, and the county around them is better at schooling than most of the places buyers compare it with. The town has its own primary within a short walk of most homes. Secondary school means a bus or a drive. Nearly nine in ten of the county's graded schools are good or better. Finding the school is easy in Stow, and finding a family to send to it is the harder part.
Across Gloucestershire, Ofsted rates 136 of the 156 schools it has graded as good or better, which is close to nine in ten. Nine are outstanding, 19 require improvement and one is inadequate. Another 95 settings have no published grade yet, so they are left out of those counts and say nothing either way. Gloucestershire draws a stronger hand than most counties, and none of those figures is specific to the town.
On the Department for Transport's 2019 modelled times, the nearest primary is about eight minutes' walk from the average home in Stow and about seven minutes by car. The nearest secondary is about 13 minutes by car or 20 by public transport. On foot it is about 78 minutes, which a teenager would describe as a hike and Gloucestershire County Council's school transport rules may describe as qualifying for a bus. The public transport times are the ones most likely to have changed since they were modelled, since buses get withdrawn and roads don't.
The obvious starting point is Stow-on-the-Wold Primary School, the one that carries the town's name. Swell Church of England Primary School covers Lower Swell, just down the hill, and Bourton-on-the-Water Primary School and The Rissington School are within reach to the south. Around them is a scatter of small Church of England primaries serving the surrounding villages, with the same small-school arithmetic that a single family moving in can noticeably change. For secondary school, the names that come up are The Cotswold Academy and Winchcombe School. Gloucestershire County Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, so living near any of these schools does not secure a place, and a few of the small village schools fill from a wide area. Ask the council which secondary each address has historically been allocated to and whether it qualifies for school transport. With a walk that long, the bus pass matters about as much as the school.
The county's numbers are strong, and Stow's own catch is demographic. The town's median age is 58 and only about 11% of households are couples with children. A family moving in will find good schools nearby and probably a lot of empty chairs at the school gate.
Schooling is one of the things Stow does genuinely well, as long as you plan for the bus.