Schooling is where Eltham is at its best, and the choice for most families is between good options. The primaries score well on end-of-primary maths. The secondaries hold their own. Across the wider borough, about nine in ten graded schools come out good or better. Families here mostly argue about which good school is the better fit.
The area has 17 mainstream state primaries, and their pupils average about 107 on the end-of-primary maths tests. Eltham Church of England Primary School has been teaching since 1814, so it was here before the railway, the bypass and nearly every house its pupils now go home to. Middle Park Primary School, Haimo Primary School and Henwick Primary School are among the others. With that many to choose from, the walk to primary is short enough that the school run is mostly a matter of stopping children wandering off.
The area's four mainstream state secondaries average an Attainment 8 score of about 53, weighted by pupil numbers. Attainment 8 measures results across a pupil's best eight subjects at sixteen. Eltham Hill School is the one carrying the place's name. St Thomas More Catholic Comprehensive School and Harris Academy Greenwich are also on the list, along with Leigh Stationers' Academy. Four schools is a short list for an area this size, so secondary choice here comes down to a handful of serious contenders.
Across the Royal Borough of Greenwich as a whole, Ofsted has graded 37 of 40 settings good or better, which is a little over nine in ten. Eleven of those are outstanding, three require improvement and none is inadequate. Another 38 settings have no published overall grade yet, which says nothing about how good they are. The borough figure takes in schools well beyond Eltham, but around here the weak end of the list is short.
Places are given out under the Royal Borough of Greenwich's published admissions rules, and living near a school's front gate doesn't secure a place there. For the faith schools, St Thomas More among them, the rules can weigh things other than distance. Read the borough's admissions criteria and its record of how far away the last child admitted lived for each school you care about, because that distance moves from year to year. Parents who buy a house to be near one particular school often discover that a few hundred children's applications decided the matter first.
Schools are one of Eltham's real strengths: nearly every option is a good one, and the families who struggle are mostly the ones who set their hearts on a single school.