The schools around Golders Green are very good, and close to the best that English state schooling offers. Almost every school with an inspection grade in the borough is rated good or better. Twelve are outstanding. Not one is inadequate. Finding a good school here is easy. Getting a child into it is the hard part.
Ofsted has given a published grade to 59 schools in the London Borough of Barnet, and 57 of them are good or outstanding, which is nearly all of them. Twelve hold the top grade of outstanding, two are rated requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 66 schools across the borough have no published overall grade yet, so they count neither for nor against the borough. Barnet has two schools in 59 that a parent might worry about. For the other 57, choosing between them comes down to preference.
Nearby primaries include Brookland Infant and Nursery School and Brookland Junior School, Garden Suburb Infant School and Garden Suburb Junior School, and Wessex Gardens Primary School. Barnet Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so living close to one of these schools gives your child a better chance and nothing more. A useful check is to ask the council how places at the school you want were allocated last year, and to compare that with the house you are about to make an offer on. Plenty of families buy within sight of a school gate and are still turned away.
The secondary most closely tied to the area is The Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Its main building, the Institute, is a listed building, so the school operates under heritage rules much like the conservation-area homes around it. The King Alfred School on North End Road is also part of the local mix. These are the schools people mention when they explain why they moved to Golders Green, and also the ones they mention when explaining why the move cost so much.
The rest of the local list is long and largely good, which leaves parents with very little to complain about. They tend to complain about admissions instead.
Schools are where Golders Green is strongest. In this borough a family's real worry is getting a place, because the quality of the schools is close to settled.