The schools are one of the best things about Sunbury. Nearly every graded school in the county is good or better. Primaries are about a ten-minute walk from the typical home. Secondaries are under twenty minutes on foot. The house prices are the hard part of living here. Getting a decent school place is easier.
Ofsted has graded 159 schools across Surrey, which is the county the figures cover, and 147 of them are rated good or better. That's about nine in ten. Of those, 30 are outstanding. At the other end, 7 require improvement and 5 are inadequate, so the county does have weak schools, though not many. Another 194 settings across Surrey have no published grade yet, either because they're new or haven't been inspected, and they're left out of the totals above.
Primaries near Sunbury include Kenyngton Manor Primary School, Chennestone Primary School, Springfield Primary School and Beauclerc Infant and Nursery School. On the Department for Transport's modelled 2019 figures, the nearest primary is about a ten-minute walk from the typical Sunbury home, or about nine minutes by public transport. Surrey County Council hands out places under its published admissions rules, so living near a particular school doesn't guarantee a place there, and distance is only one of the criteria. Look up the council's last-distance-offered figure for each primary you're considering, because that shows how far from the gate places actually went. Kenyngton was one of the old spellings of a manor recorded around Sunbury in Domesday Book in 1086. The name has stayed the same for nine centuries, but whether a place comes with the address is decided again every spring.
At secondary level, the local list includes The Bishop Wand Church of England School, St Paul's Catholic College and Three Rivers Academy. On the same modelled 2019 figures, the nearest secondary is about 19 minutes' walk from the typical home, about 16 minutes by public transport and nine by car. Bus timetables have changed since 2019, so the public transport time is the one most likely to be out of date. Hampton High is on the list too. It's across the boundary in Hampton, so applying there means dealing with a second council's admissions rules.
There's also a strong independent sector nearby. Hampton School for boys and Lady Eleanor Holles School for girls are both selective independents in Hampton, under three miles from the centre of Sunbury. Some parents pay for one of them and skip the admissions appeal altogether. Others move to Sunbury for the state primaries and end up running the entrance exam timetable anyway.
Schools are one of Sunbury's real strengths. The county has very few weak schools, and the walk to most of the good ones is short.