The schools are the best thing about Barking, and it isn't close. Almost every graded school in the borough is good or outstanding. A third of the graded ones are outstanding. Not one is rated inadequate. A town people mostly talk about for its trains turns out to be strongest at the school gates.
Barking and Dagenham has 21 schools holding a published Ofsted grade, and 20 of them are good or outstanding, which leaves exactly one that isn't. Seven are rated outstanding and 13 good, while a single school requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 35 settings across the borough have no published overall grade yet, mostly because they are new or have not been through a full inspection under the current framework, and that tells you nothing either way about how good they are. Read the borough figure as the borough, too. It includes Dagenham, Becontree and Chadwell Heath as well as Barking.
The names that matter here are the ones on Barking's own map. Barking Abbey School is the secondary carrying the town's name, and it keeps a tradition going. Until the dissolution in 1539 the nunnery it is named after was one of the major centres of female learning in England, so the town has been running education for longer than most of London has had streets. Eastbury Community School teaches from primary age through to secondary, which saves its families one round of applications. In the south, Riverside Primary School and Riverside School were built for the new Barking Riverside development, with Thames View Infants and Thames View Junior School on the older estate next door. The rest of the town's primaries, Northbury, Gascoigne and St Margarets CofE among them, are spread through the residential streets.
The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the average walk to a primary school at about seven minutes and to a secondary at about 13, so the school run here is mostly done on foot. Short walks don't decide admissions, though. Places are given out under Barking and Dagenham council's published admissions rules, and a house in sight of a school's playground can still lose out to a sibling claim or a faith criterion. Ask the council's admissions team how far from the gates the last place went in recent years for the school you have in mind, and ask early for the Riverside schools in particular, where the number of new families is still climbing with every new block. Parents who buy a flat by the river expecting the school to grow with the development sometimes find that the development grows faster.
The schools are Barking's real strength. On grades alone, a family moving in is choosing between good schools and outstanding ones, and very few places at this price can say that.