Witham's schools give parents more to be pleased about than to fight over. There are nine state primaries in the area. There are two state secondaries, run by the same trust. Nearly nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The primaries do the heavy work, and the secondary decision is short because there are only two options to make it between.
Around Witham, the nine mainstream state primaries average a Key Stage 2 maths score of about 103. Templars Academy and Chipping Hill Primary School are among them. Chipping Hill took its name from the Saxon settlement and the old market at the north end of town, then moved out of its premises on Church Street into a new building on Owers Road in 2012. The oldest name in Witham now hangs over one of its newer buildings.
The two mainstream state secondaries in the area, Lift Maltings and Lift New Rickstones, average an Attainment 8 score of about 40 across their pupils. Both belong to the Lift Academies chain, and both were rebuilt and completed in 2011. Parents weighing one against the other are comparing siblings.
Essex has 246 schools and settings with a published Ofsted grade, and 218 of them are rated good or better, a little under nine in ten. Of the rest, 22 are outstanding at the top end, while 23 require improvement and 5 are inadequate. A further 238 hold no published grade yet. The Chatten Free School, a special school for pupils with severe, complex autism that opened in 2021, takes children from across Essex, so its admissions run on county lines. The Ofsted counts cover the whole of Essex, and a county average tells a parent very little about the classroom their child will actually sit in.
Places at every one of these schools are allocated under Essex County Council's published admissions rules, and living near a school does not by itself secure a place there. The council publishes each school's admission criteria and how far the last child offered a place lived, and reading that for the school that matters to you takes ten minutes. "Walking distance to Chipping Hill" in a set of particulars describes a walk.
Witham's schools are one of its real strengths, with a county picture that is mostly good and solid primaries close to home.