The schools around Virginia Water are good, and it would take real effort to pick a bad one. More than nine in ten graded Surrey schools are good or better. Two small state schools sit inside the village. The state secondary is a short drive away in Chertsey. Most parents here have already spent the money on the house, so the relief is that the schools don't ask for more.
Ofsted has graded 159 schools across Surrey, and 147 of them are good or outstanding, which is more than nine in ten. Thirty are outstanding. Seven require improvement and five are inadequate, so the bad ones exist, but they're rare enough that finding one takes effort. These are county-wide counts, not Virginia Water's own. A further 194 settings across Surrey hold no published grade yet, which says nothing about them either way.
On the ground, the primary years are handled locally. Trumps Green Infant School is on Crown Road and St Ann's Heath Junior School is on Sandhills Lane, which gives the village an infant-then-junior route without anyone leaving the postcode. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling put the nearest primary about a ten-minute walk from the average home, or under eight minutes by car. In a place where the drive is often longer than the walk to school, that's the one journey the car can sit out.
Secondary is a different trip. Salesian School in Chertsey is the state secondary on the local list, and the same modelling put the nearest secondary about 13 minutes by car, 30 by public transport and nearly an hour on foot. With a bus network that barely runs, the teenage years here come with a parent attached to a steering wheel. Nobody mentions that at the viewing.
Beyond the state list, the area also counts TASIS England, ACS Egham International School and Bishopsgate School among its other schools. Their names turn up in local conversation more than their prospectuses turn up in local letterboxes, and they're a separate decision with its own admissions process.
Buying near a school gets you nearer to it and nothing more. Admissions follow the council's rules, not the estate agent's floor plan, and a house on Sandhills Lane is not a place at St Ann's Heath. Parents who assume otherwise find out in the spring, usually by letter. Check the admission criteria for the year you need before the survey, not after the offer.
For schools, Virginia Water is one of the strongest places in the county to buy. The grades are there, the primaries are close, and the only hard part is the drive to secondary.