Dartford's schools are one of the best reasons to buy here. Around nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. Local primary maths results come in strong. Four grammar schools are within reach of the town. Many families pick their streets around school admissions before they think about the house.
There are 24 state primary schools in the area, and their pupils average a scaled score of about 106 in maths at the end of primary school. That is a solid local result. Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School, Dartford takes its name from the parish church in the town centre. Temple Hill Primary Academy serves the estate built after the war in 1947, and The Brent Primary School is named after the old common where Richard, Duke of York camped his army in 1452. Your seven-year-old will not be the first child here asked to line up.
The 10 state secondary schools in the area average about 56 on Attainment 8, the government's measure of results across a pupil's best eight subjects. That figure is weighted by pupil numbers. The grammar schools explain a good part of it. Dartford Grammar School was founded in 1576 as part of a Tudor drive to educate ordinary people, and it now selects which ordinary people it educates. Dartford Grammar School for Girls and the boys' and girls' grammar schools in Wilmington complete the set, so a family in the south of the town has four selective schools within reach and one very tense autumn of Year 6 ahead.
Across Kent as a whole, Ofsted has given a published grade to 245 settings, and 221 of them are good or outstanding, roughly nine in every ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. Another 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. A further 255 settings in the county have no published grade yet, which says nothing about them either way. A county-wide profile tells you how Kent's schools are doing overall. A parent needs to know about the school at the end of their road.
Kent County Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, and those rules decide who gets in. Living near a school does not reserve a place there, however close the gates are to your front door. For a church school such as Holy Trinity, or a selective one such as the Wilmington grammars, the criteria go well beyond distance. Ask the county council how far from the school the last place was offered in recent years, and read the oversubscription criteria for the specific school, ideally before you have agreed a price. Plenty of families move to Dartford for the grammar schools and then find out the house was the easy part.
For schools, Dartford is one of the strongest choices around. Primary results are good, the county's inspection record is solid, and the grammar schools give families something they would otherwise have to move a lot further to find.