Witney's schools are one of the best reasons to buy there. Nearly nine in ten graded schools and settings across the county are good or better. The town has two state secondaries of its own. Primary schools are spread across the estates, so most families have one close by. The worry here is admissions rules, and very few parents end up worrying about grades.
Ofsted has graded 121 schools and settings across Oxfordshire, and 108 of them are rated good or better, close to nine in ten. Eleven of those are outstanding and 97 good. Ten require improvement and three are inadequate. Another 151 settings across the county have no published grade yet and are left out of those counts. That county picture covers Witney and a great deal of countryside around it, so it describes the area's schools in general and says nothing about any single classroom.
Living near a school does not get your child a place in it. Oxfordshire County Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, and those rules decide the result. Parents in the town spend the autumn of Year 6 reading that rulebook the way other people read their mortgage terms, and their best tactic is to read the over-subscription criteria for the school they want and find out how far away last year's final offer reached. The town has primaries in the middle and out on the estates, so a family who misses its first choice usually still ends up within the town.
The Henry Box School is the oldest school name in Witney. Henry Box founded it as the town's grammar school in 1660, and it became a comprehensive in 1968, with new buildings added beside the seventeenth-century premises on Church Green. Parents who wanted a grammar school can at least have the building. Wood Green School, at the top of Woodstock Road, opened in 1954 and was expanded between 2000 and 2004 with a new teaching block and a sixth form centre. Springfield School, a special school for pupils with severe learning difficulties, runs its senior section as a self-contained unit within Wood Green's grounds.
For younger children, the Church of England's The Batt Church of England Primary School is in Corn Street, close to the old centre, and Witney Community Primary School is the one with the town's name on it. For parents who want to pay, Cokethorpe School is an independent secondary nearby. The rest of the primaries, Church of England, Catholic and community, are spread across the town. Which one a child gets depends on the admissions rules, and parents rarely get much say.
Witney is a strong place to buy for schools. The county's grades are high, two state secondaries are in the town itself, and most families can walk to a primary. The hard part is admissions, and Oxfordshire's grades give parents little to worry about.