Forest Hill's schools are very good, and the borough around them has almost nothing in the bad column. Nearly every graded school is good or better. Four are outstanding. None is inadequate. Parents here have far less to fret about than they will manage to fret about anyway.
Ofsted has graded 35 schools across Lewisham, and 34 of them are good or outstanding, which leaves one school out of the whole borough below that line. Four carry the outstanding grade, one requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 41 settings in the borough hold no published overall grade yet, mostly because they are new or have not been through a full inspection. They are simply unrated, and nothing about their quality can be read into the gap. A borough where the bad news fits on one line is a rare thing in London.
None of that hands anyone a place. Lewisham allocates school places by its published admissions rules, and a house round the corner from the school you want secures nothing on its own, however the particulars phrase the distance. Ask the council for the last few years' allocation figures for the school you are counting on, and look at how far away the last child admitted lived. Parents who skip that step tend to discover the rules the week the offer emails arrive, which is the most expensive time to learn them.
A handful of names say most of what there is to know. Forest Hill School is the secondary that carries the district's name, and for many families on the hill it is the obvious first question. Horniman Primary School shares its name with the museum on the hill, and Perrymount Primary School and Kilmorie Primary School are among the other primaries in and around the area. Stillness Infant School and Stillness Junior School split the primary years between them, so a family there changes schools at seven without moving house. Beyond those, the area has church primaries and a Catholic primary, which set their own admissions criteria and are worth reading separately. Several other primaries on the area's edge come under the same borough-wide inspection picture.
Schools are one of Forest Hill's real strengths. A family who buys here and loses the place they wanted will most likely land somewhere the inspectors rate just as highly.