Woodstock's schools are strong, and the town gets them close to home. There is a Church of England primary in town and another in Bladon. The secondary is named after the Duke of Marlborough. Most children can walk to school, which in a palace town counts as the cheapest thing on offer.
Across Oxfordshire, Ofsted has graded 121 schools and other settings, and 108 of them are good or better, close to nine in ten. Eleven are rated outstanding, ten require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 151 settings in the county have no published grade yet, which tells a parent nothing either way. These are county-wide counts, so they describe the system Woodstock's children are in more than the three gates nearest the High Street.
The schools that matter here are Woodstock Church of England Primary School in the town, Bladon Church of England Primary School a short way south, and The Marlborough Church of England School for the secondary years. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about a nine-minute walk from the average home and the nearest secondary about 16 minutes on foot or eight by car. Oxfordshire County Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so a house round the corner from a school is close to it and nothing more, however the particulars phrase it. Wootton, two miles up the Glyme, no longer has a primary of its own, so families there are already on the road. Ask the county council how far from the gate last year's final offers went for the primary you want, because that distance is the real boundary and it moves every year.
The secondary carries the name of the family who built the palace, and the town has always taken learning seriously enough to put it in charge. William Fordyce Mavor, teacher, priest and compiler of educational books, was first elected mayor in 1808, and Mavor Close on the Barn Piece estate in Old Woodstock still carries his name. A schoolbook writer running the town council is about as Woodstock as civic life gets.
Schools are one of the town's real strengths. Parents get a good county system and short walks to the gate, provided the county council's allocation rules agree with the house they chose.