Balham's schools are excellent, and the hard part is getting a place at one. Nearly every graded school across the borough is good or better. Almost one in four is outstanding. None is inadequate. Most front doors are a short walk from a primary.
Ofsted has graded 40 schools across Wandsworth, the authority that covers Balham, and 38 of them are good or outstanding, which is nineteen in every twenty. Nine hold an outstanding grade, two are rated requires improvement, and none is inadequate. Another 30 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, either because they are new or because the inspectors have not reached them, and they belong in neither column. A borough where the weak end of the list is two schools is a borough where parents argue about which good school, which is a nicer argument to be having.
The primaries close to Balham include Alderbrook Primary School, Telferscot Primary School and Ravenstone Primary School, alongside St Bede's Catholic Primary School and Trinity St Mary's Church of England Primary School. Places are handed out under the council's published admissions rules, and faith schools set their own criteria on top, so a house on the right street buys proximity to a school and nothing more. Get last year's allocation figures for the specific school from Wandsworth's admissions team, because "walking distance" means one thing on a map and another in the offer letter. The Department for Transport modelled the walk to the nearest primary at about six minutes on average in 2019, so the school run here is shorter than most people's queue for a coffee.
The secondary list close by includes Chestnut Grove Academy and La Retraite Roman Catholic Girls' School, with St Francis Xavier Sixth Form College for students staying on past 16. The same 2019 modelling put the nearest secondary about 11 minutes' walk away on average. That is close enough for an eleven-year-old to manage alone, which is the first piece of independence most Balham parents find themselves negotiating.
There is also a cluster of preparatory schools, among them Hornsby House School, The White House Preparatory School and Broomwood Pre-Prep, for families choosing that route. Two nearby schools have closed recently, so any older guide or map pointing families toward them is out of date.
Schooling is one of Balham's real strengths. The trouble here is choosing between good schools and then persuading the admissions rules to agree with the choice.