The schools in Canning Town are very good, and they are the strongest argument for living here. Every graded school in the borough is rated good or outstanding. The primaries score comfortably above the expected standard in maths. Secondaries are within easy reach. Parents who came for the cheap-ish flat end up with a better school run than they bargained for.
Ofsted's results across Newham are about as clean as they get. All 50 of the borough's schools and settings with a published grade are rated good or outstanding, and 22 of them are outstanding. None requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 38 have no published grade yet, and they are simply waiting their turn, with nothing implied about them either way. For parents who are used to picking a school by crossing off the bad ones first, that list doesn't take long.
The 11 state primaries in the area average about 109 on the Key Stage 2 maths scale, comfortably above the expected standard. Hallsville Primary School takes its name from Hallsville, one of the first settlements to grow up around the Royal Victoria Dock and these days usually counted as part of Canning Town. In 1857 Henry Morley wrote that the steadier families working on the docks went home to Stratford or Plaistow. These days a family can stay put and walk to a primary instead. Royal Wharf Primary School serves the newer riverside development towards Silvertown, and Rosetta Primary School and Star Primary School are among the other primaries around here.
The five state secondaries in the area produce a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of about 45, the average across the eight GCSE subjects that measure counts. Rokeby School, Royal Docks Academy and Oasis Academy Silvertown are among them, so most families have a secondary close enough that the morning traffic does not decide the choice for them.
Living close to a named school does not guarantee a place. Newham Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, and the flat you chose because the school gate is visible from the balcony gets the same rules as everyone else's. Faith schools add a layer of their own: St Joachim's Catholic Primary School sets its own admissions criteria, so a family aiming for it needs to read that policy as well as the council's, and read it a year before the application deadline, not the week of it. Every school named here appears in the area's current school lists. Two nearby schools have closed and are no longer an option, so nobody should be planning around them.
Schools are the part of Canning Town that over-delivers. A family can choose almost any of them without losing sleep.