Ware's schools are one of the better reasons to buy here. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. Both secondaries are in the town itself. Primary results come in comfortably respectable. The gaps open up in the villages, where the school has sometimes gone before the families have.
Three mainstream state primaries in the area have published results, and their pupils averaged a scaled score of about 102.5 in Key Stage 2 maths. That is a solid, unshowy figure from a small base, and three schools is few enough that one strong year group can move it. In the town, St Mary's Voluntary Controlled Church of England Junior School is among the names parents will hear first, while Thundridge Church of England Primary School still serves its village up the Rib valley. Wareside and Tonwell have both lost their village primaries, so families buying a cottage out there are buying a school run along with it.
At secondary level, the one mainstream state school in the area with published results recorded an average Attainment 8 score of about 53. Ware has two secondaries, Presdales School and The Chauncy School. Presdales opened in 1906 as the town's grammar school, went comprehensive in the early 1970s and is now a lead language hub school, which gives the town's teenagers a better shot at a second language than most parents in Ware ever managed. The Chauncy School is mixed from the first year to the last, and Hertford Regional College has its Creative & Enterprise Campus in town for anyone heading towards a vocational course after sixteen.
Hertfordshire, the authority responsible for the whole county and not just Ware, has 203 of its 227 graded settings rated good or better by Ofsted, close to nine in ten. Forty of those are outstanding, 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. Settings that have not yet been graded are left out of those counts. With odds that good across the county, Ware parents worry less about finding a decent school and more about the bus timetable.
Places are allocated under Hertfordshire County Council's published admissions rules, so a house round the corner from Presdales or Chauncy buys proximity and nothing more binding. Families looking in Thundridge, Wareside or the other villages north of town should read those rules for their exact address and see which primary they would realistically be offered. The distance between a village and a good school is measured in miles, and the council does the measuring.
Schools are a genuine strength in Ware. Two secondaries in the town and a county where good is the norm put it ahead of most of what a family will weigh here, provided they do the admissions homework for the village they are buying in.