The schools around Bearsted are good, and the odds are on your side. Nine in ten graded schools in the county come out good or better. For most homes, the nearest primary is a short walk. Secondary means a short drive or a longer bus ride. What you should worry about is the admissions form, not the teaching.
The Ofsted figures cover all of Kent, not Bearsted alone, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes them at a dinner party. Of the 245 settings with a published overall grade, Ofsted has rated 221 good or better, about nine in every ten. That includes 38 rated outstanding. At the other end, 21 were graded requires improvement and 3 inadequate. Another 255 settings hold no published grade, because they're new or haven't been inspected yet, so leave them out of the sums rather than reading anything into them. For a county the size of Kent, that's a strong record. Bad luck is more likely to come from the admissions allocation than from the school you end up in.
The primaries on the doorstep say something about how the village is laid out. Leigh Academy Bearsted carries the village's name. Madginford Primary School serves the 1960s neighbourhood south of the Ashford Road. Thurnham Church of England Infant School and Roseacre Junior School are among the other options parents weigh up. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 12 minutes' walk away on average, or about 8 minutes by car, and plenty of parents drive it anyway. Past Maidstone's edge there's a much longer list of primaries, which gives families choice and gives admissions officers plenty of preferences to sort through.
Secondary schools involve more travel. The nearest secondary is about 14 minutes away by car in the same modelling, about 28 minutes by public transport and about 40 minutes on foot. Maidstone Grammar School, Invicta Grammar School and Valley Park School are among the secondaries in the wider area, and each has its own admissions rules. Read those rules before you fall for a kitchen, because the kitchen won't get your child a place.
The usual warning applies here, and plenty of buyers ignore it. A school's name on an estate agent's particulars guarantees nothing. Admissions depend on each school's published criteria and on how many other families applied that year, and neither of those will match the brochure. Check the admissions arrangements for the specific address, then check them again for the year your child applies. Buyers who assume the nearest school is automatically theirs tend to learn otherwise in the spring the offers come out, and by then the removal van has left.
Schools are one of Bearsted's real strengths: good or better is the norm across the county, and the only real risk is assuming a place before you've checked the admissions rules.