Schools are one of the better reasons to buy in Waltham Cross. The primaries do well in maths. The secondaries do a solid job without making headlines. The county around them is mostly graded good or better. Families tend to come for the London trains, and the classrooms turn out to be the part of the move that works without much fuss.
There are 13 mainstream state primary schools in the area, and their pupils average a maths score of about 105 in the end-of-primary tests, a few points clear of the mark the tests set as the expected standard. Four Swannes Primary School carries the town's oldest emblem in its name, the swans that once hung outside a coaching inn on the High Street. St Joseph's Catholic Primary School and Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School give parents a faith option without leaving town. A primary school is never far from a front door here, and the morning walk is short enough to keep a child's shoes clean.
The four mainstream state secondaries in the area post an average Attainment 8 score of about 44, weighted by pupil numbers. St Mary's Church of England High School and Haileybury Turnford are among them, along with Goffs Academy, and families will look at each school's own results long before the area average. An area figure of 44 tells a parent the schools are competent. It says nothing about which one their child would get into.
Hertfordshire County Council's schools are graded good or outstanding by Ofsted in 203 of the 227 settings it has published grades for, close to nine in ten. Forty of those are outstanding, 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. The count runs from the M25 to the Cambridgeshire border, so it describes a county far more than a town, and the 21 that need work are somewhere in there too. Hertfordshire parents have been reading these numbers for years and still check the individual report.
Living near a school is the first thing buyers measure and the last thing the council counts. Places are allocated under Hertfordshire's published admissions rules, so living near a particular school is no promise of a place in it, and faith schools such as St Joseph's and St Mary's set their own criteria on top. The council publishes how far away the last child offered a place lived in previous years, and that one number is worth more to a family than any brochure. Parents who discover it in the spring their child starts school tend to read every word of the rules the following year.
Waltham Cross gives a family strong primaries and dependable secondaries inside a county that is mostly well run on schools, and that comes to considerably more than the price of the houses here would lead anyone to expect.