The schools in Dulwich are very good, and the area is short of excuses on this front. Every graded school in the borough bar one is rated good or better. A primary is usually a short walk away. The best-known school building here is so old it's listed.
Ofsted has given a published grade to 47 schools across Southwark, the borough Dulwich belongs to, and 46 of them are rated good or outstanding. That is every one except a single school. Fifteen are rated outstanding, one requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 41 settings in the borough have no published overall grade yet, which means nobody has inspected them under the current scheme, not that anything is wrong with them. Across a whole London borough, a record like that leaves parents with very little to worry about at the inspection stage.
For younger children, the state primaries carry the area's names. Dulwich Village Church of England Infants' School and Dulwich Hamlet Junior School cover the early and junior years in the village, and Dulwich Wood Primary School and Rosendale Primary School are the other primaries in the area. The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about seven minutes' walk away on average and the nearest secondary about 12 minutes. Those are modelled distances to the nearest school, which may not be the one your child is given. Southwark Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, so living near Dulwich Hamlet Junior School doesn't on its own get your child into it. The council's admissions page sets out how each oversubscribed school ranked its applicants last year, and it's worth reading for the specific school you have in mind. Plenty of parents here have discovered that a short walk to the gate and a place at the school are two very different things.
At secondary age, Kingsdale Foundation School is the state option named in the area. Turney Primary and Secondary Special School serves children with special educational needs across both age ranges.
Then come the schools that need a separate budget. Dulwich College, Alleyn's Oakfield and Dulwich Prep & Senior are all here, and so are Rosemead Preparatory School and its nursery. The main building of Dulwich College is a listed building in its own right. Its roots go back to the school Edward Alleyn built in 1619 as part of his charitable foundation, the College of God's Gift. A gift is a stretch for what it costs now. In Dulwich, a fair share of the people walking to school in the morning are on their way to classrooms where the bill goes with the blazer. Fees aren't something these pages measure.
Lord Byron was a pupil at Dr Glennie's academy in Dulwich Grove, back when the building was a school and not yet a closed-up tavern. The standards have held up better than the building has.
Schools are one of the clear reasons to live in Dulwich. The state schools around it are about as reliably good as anywhere in London, and the hard part is getting a place in one, not finding a good one.