Finchley's schools are excellent, and the only real problem with them is how many other parents know it. Nearly every graded school in the borough is good or better. A dozen are outstanding. None is inadequate. Finding a good school here is easy, and getting a place at one is the hard part.
Of the 59 Barnet schools with a published Ofsted grade, 57 are rated good or outstanding, which is almost all of them. Twelve are outstanding, two require improvement and none is inadequate. Those counts cover the whole of Barnet, so Finchley's share is part of a borough-wide picture and not a separate local tally. Another 66 settings across the borough have no published overall grade yet. They are new, not yet inspected or outside the grading system, and they count neither for nor against the borough. With two schools requiring improvement in the whole borough, the parents who like to worry at the school gate have very little to work with.
When almost every school is good, parents stop arguing about which school and start arguing about who gets a seat. Places are allocated under Barnet Council's published admissions rules, so a house near a school's gates does not on its own secure a place there. Barnet Council publishes those rules and the past allocation results for each school. Read them for the school you have in mind, and check the actual walking distance from the house you are looking at, before the move gets serious. The rules are the same for every family, and parents who expected an exception for themselves tend to be the most surprised.
Some of the local primaries tell you something about the place. Moss Hall Junior School shares its name with the Moss Hall Crescent conservation area, and St Mary's CofE Primary shares its name with the parish church, which has stood here since the Middle Ages. Tudor Primary School, Manorside Primary School and St Theresa's Catholic Primary School round out the local options. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling put the nearest primary about 8 minutes' walk away on average. The nearest secondary was about 19 minutes on foot, 17 by public transport or 9 by car. Those times are seven years old, though schools tend to stay where they are. An eight-minute walk leaves the family car with very little excuse to be outside the gates.
Schools are the part of Finchley that does most to justify its prices, and for parents the hard work is the admissions form, not the search.