Camberwell's schools are the best thing about it, and it isn't close. Nearly every graded school in the borough is good or better. Primary results are solid. Secondary results hold up too. The hard part here is the planning office and the price of a terrace, not the school run.
Around Camberwell there are nine mainstream state primaries, and their pupils post an average maths score of about 106 at the end of primary school. Among the primaries in the area are Oliver Goldsmith, John Ruskin Primary School and Language Classes, and Lyndhurst. That is a lot of literary and artistic expectation to load onto a reception class, and the results suggest the children are carrying it.
The secondary list is short. Two mainstream state secondaries sit in the area, and their pupils average an Attainment 8 score of 52, the measure built from a pupil's best eight subjects at sixteen. They are Ark All Saints Academy and Sacred Heart Catholic School. Two is a list families learn by heart around the time the eldest starts asking what a blazer costs.
The inspection record is close to spotless. Southwark has 47 schools with a published Ofsted grade, and 46 of them are rated good or outstanding, which is all but one. Fifteen are outstanding, one requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 41 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, which says nothing either way about how they teach. In a borough like this the inspection report is rarely the document that keeps parents up at night.
What does keep them up is admissions. Places are handed out under the council's published admissions rules, so buying the flat nearest John Ruskin or Oliver Goldsmith gets you a short walk and nothing more. For a church school such as Sacred Heart, the rules can weigh faith and distance in ways a map never shows. The admissions criteria for the exact school you want, read before an offer goes in, are worth more than any line in the particulars about being close to good schools.
A family moving to Camberwell for the schools has made one of the safer decisions in the whole purchase. The schools are a genuine strength, with only the short secondary list to plan around.