Good, and Surrey makes them hard to miss. Nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. Thirty are outstanding. The average primary is a ten-minute walk from home. For Walton, schools are the part of the decision that mostly makes itself.
Across Surrey County Council's area, Ofsted has published grades for 159 schools and settings, and 147 of them are rated good or outstanding, about nine in every ten. Thirty hold the top grade. At the other end, seven require improvement and five are inadequate. Another 194 settings in the county hold no published grade yet, so they're neither praised nor blamed in that count. These are county figures, and the twelve below the line are somewhere in Surrey. The 147 above it are too, and that includes more than Walton's handful.
The schools carrying the town's name are Walton Oak Primary School and Heathside Walton-on-Thames at secondary level. Around them is a spread of primaries including Grovelands Primary School, St James CofE Primary School and Cardinal Newman Catholic Primary School, with Three Rivers Academy as another secondary option. Walton Leigh School provides specialist places, and Brooklands College covers further education. Surrey County Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, and being close to a school gate doesn't secure a place, however short the walk looks on a map. Two of those primaries are church schools, with admissions criteria of their own. Download the council's admissions criteria for the specific schools on your list and check how far away last year's last offer went. That distance changes from year to year, and it rarely matches the radius a buyer has in mind.
The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the average Walton home about 10 minutes' walk from a primary school and about 26 minutes' walk from a secondary, or roughly 22 minutes by public transport and 11 by car. Walton built its first board school after a School Board was formed in 1878, and the walk to primary has been the easy bit ever since. Secondary is where the school run turns into an actual run, or a lift.
Walton's schools are one of its real strengths, backed by a county where good is the normal grade. The work for a parent here is getting into the right school, since finding a good one is the easy part.