Good, and better than Swindon's reputation suggests. More than four in five inspected schools are rated good or better. There are dozens of primaries, so most families have a real choice. The secondaries are worth comparing one by one before you pick a street. Nobody makes jokes about Swindon's schools, and the inspection record gives them no reason to.
The area has 45 state primaries. Their pupils average about 104 in the Key Stage 2 maths assessment taken at the end of primary school. That is a pupil average across the whole area, so it smooths over the differences between a strong school and a struggling one. Both kinds exist in any town this size. Even Swindon Primary School is one of the local primaries, which is a name that would not survive an estate agent's marketing meeting. Gorse Hill Primary School and Abbey Farm Educate Together Primary are two more among the dozens. Enough primaries are within walking distance that the school run shouldn't need a car.
There are 12 state secondaries in the area. Their pupils score an average of about 45 on Attainment 8, the measure built from a pupil's best eight subjects at sixteen. Swindon Academy and Kingsdown School are part of that group. A headline figure of 45 hides a range, as every pupil-weighted average does. The school down the road may be well above it or well below it, and the only way to know is to look it up. Parents who pick a house on the town average and find out the local secondary's figure afterwards are the ones who end up at appeal hearings.
Ofsted has graded 38 of 46 settings good or better, more than four in five, and 3 of those are outstanding. Another 7 were judged as requiring improvement and 1 as inadequate. These counts cover the whole Swindon local authority, not just the town. They describe the system your child will join, not the particular school at the end of your road. A further 35 settings have no published grade yet, which means they haven't been graded, not that they are poor.
Buying a house near a school doesn't get your child a place there. Admissions follow the council's rules and each school's oversubscription criteria, and those rules decide places, not how close you live to the gates on moving day. Check the admissions rules for the specific school before you exchange contracts. Asking the estate agent won't tell you.
Schools are one of Swindon's real strengths: a strong inspection record across the borough, with good-or-better settings far outnumbering the rest. The one thing to do before buying is check the particular secondary, not the town average.