The schools around Camden Town are strong, and the primaries are the best part of the story. Every school in the borough with a published inspection grade is rated good or better. About half of those are outstanding. Primary results come in comfortably above the expected standard. The secondary picture is thinner, with only a handful of schools to judge it on.
There are 13 mainstream state primaries in the area, and their pupils average a maths score of about 106 at the end of primary school, comfortably above the line the test sets as the expected standard. Among them are Richard Cobden Primary School, Edith Neville Primary School and St Mary and St Pancras Church of England Primary School, which between them cover the stretch from the high street down towards the stations. Parents who first came to Camden Town for the Stables Market on a Sunday tend to find the primaries later, at half past eight on a school morning, with a book bag.
The area has three mainstream state secondaries, and their pupils average an Attainment 8 score of about 44, weighted by the number of pupils at each. Regent High School is one of them. Three schools is a small base, so one school having a good or bad year moves the average more than any change in teaching across the area would.
In the borough of Camden, Ofsted has graded 25 schools and settings, and all 25 are rated good or better. Thirteen of them are outstanding, and none is rated as requiring improvement or inadequate. Another 26 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, which tells a parent nothing either way. A clean sheet across an entire London borough is rare enough that the inspectors could have saved some ink.
Places are handed out under Camden Council's published admissions rules, so buying a flat round the corner from Primrose Hill School does not, on its own, buy a place there, and the rules for faith schools add their own criteria on top. Two nearby primaries have closed recently, so any older list or map that points a family at either of them is out of date. It is worth reading the council's admissions rules for the year your child would start and checking that every school on your shortlist is still open. The parents who get caught out are usually the ones working from a list someone handed them three years ago.
On schools, Camden Town is genuinely hard to fault: the primaries are excellent, every graded school in the borough has cleared the bar, and the only weak point is how few secondaries there are to choose between.