The schools are one of the better arguments for the place. Four state primaries serve the town and its villages. All of them are a walk rather than a drive. The single secondary is half an hour on foot, which means it is a drive. In a town where families arrive with a posting date already written on the calendar, the school run being this short is not a small thing.
On the national tests taken at the end of primary school, the four mainstream state primaries in the area average about 102 in maths. Getting to them is the easy part: the modelled journey time to a primary is about seven minutes on foot, and the same by car, which tells you the car is pointless. Clarendon Infants' School and Clarendon Junior School run as one federation through the town, with Zouch Academy and Wellington Lions Primary Academy alongside them, and Shipton Bellinger Primary School covering the village to the east. Perham Down sits in the same orbit.
Secondary is one option rather than a choice. The academy that serves the town opened in 2009 in place of the school that stood there before, and it carries a sixth form, an all-weather pitch and Combined Cadet Force facilities with a parent unit at the barracks up the road. A school with its own cadet detachment sounds like a marketing gimmick until the town it sits in is a garrison, at which point it is just the local employer taking an interest. The trip is about ten minutes by car, roughly twenty by public transport, and closer to half an hour if a teenager is walking it in February.
Ofsted has published overall grades for 128 settings across Wiltshire, which is the whole local authority rather than Tidworth alone, and 106 of them are good or better. That is about five in six. Six are outstanding, 20 require improvement and 2 are inadequate. A further 73 settings hold no published overall grade at all, which means not yet inspected under current arrangements rather than a result somebody is sitting on.
None of that guarantees your child a desk. Places are allocated through the local authority's admissions process, not by which school you can see from the landing window, and in a town where households cycle through faster than most, the number of applicants in any given year is not something you can predict from the estate agent's floorplan. Buy on the assumption you will get the nearest school and you may be right. Plan on it and you have made a bet you cannot hedge.
What the county-wide grades cannot tell you is the specific thing about schooling in a garrison town, which is churn. Children arrive mid-term and leave mid-term, and every school here is built around that reality rather than pretending it away. Some parents find that reassuring, because their child is never the only new one in the room. Others find it exhausting, because the friend made in September is in Germany by Easter. Both reactions are correct.
Taken as a whole, schooling is one of the strongest cards Tidworth holds: primaries within walking distance, a county record where the overwhelming majority of graded settings sit at good or better, and a secondary that at least knows exactly who its pupils are. Nobody moves here for the schools. They tend to stay glad of them.