Acton's schools are one of the best things about living here, and parents will struggle to find a weak one nearby. Nearly every graded school around it is good or better. More than a third are outstanding. None has been judged inadequate. The schools are rarely the problem here. Getting a place at the one you want is.
Ofsted has graded 39 schools across the Ealing local authority area, and 36 of them are good or outstanding, so almost all of them. Fourteen are outstanding and 22 good. Three require improvement, and none is inadequate. Another 49 settings have no published grade yet. They haven't been judged, so they shouldn't be read as weak. These counts cover the whole of Ealing, so they describe the system an Acton child joins as well as Acton itself.
Ealing allocates places by the council's published admissions rules, so living near a school does not secure a place there, however short the walk. The Department for Transport's modelled times from 2019 put the nearest primary about 7 minutes' walk from the average home and the nearest secondary about 15 minutes. Ealing publishes how far from each school the last place went in recent years, so check those distances for the schools you want against the house you are looking at. Families who skip that step find out in April which rule they were relying on.
At primary level the names follow the map. East Acton Primary School and West Acton Primary School do what their names promise, and Acton Gardens Primary School adds a third option. Ark Byron Primary Academy opened in 2015 and is based in Acton Park, and the same charity also runs Ark Priory Primary Academy. The rest of the primaries are spread across the neighbourhoods, from North Acton down to the streets near the main line.
Secondary choice is wider than most parents expect. Ark Acton Academy is the one with the town's name on it. Twyford Church of England High School and The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls give families a choice of character as well as location, and Ark Soane Academy adds a newer option. The Ark name is on four of the schools named here, so one charity has more say over a local child's education than most parents realise when they move in.
Ealing's schools are one of Acton's real strengths, good enough that the question for most families is which school they can get into. Whether any of them are good enough is mostly settled.