The schools around Hadlow are good, and the inspection record backs that up. Nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. The village has its own primary school. It also has its own secondary, which most villages this size can only look at enviously from the school-run traffic. Here the hard part is getting a place, not finding a good school.
Ofsted has graded 221 of 245 schools and settings across Kent as good or outstanding, about nine in every ten. Those counts cover the whole of Kent, not just Hadlow, so they describe the system your children would be applying into rather than the village alone. Of those 245, 38 are outstanding, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Another 255 settings have no published grade yet, which says nothing either way about how good they are. The county's weak schools exist, but they are a small minority, and parents who treat every shortlist as a crisis are fighting the odds rather than the evidence.
Living near a school is not a place at it. Admissions are decided by the published criteria for each school each year, and a house close to the gates can still miss out if more families apply than there are places. Before offering on a house, check how admissions worked for the school you want in recent years, and don't rely on what the estate agent says about the catchment. The agent will talk as if the house comes with a place attached. It never does.
Hadlow Primary School on School Lane is the obvious starting point for a village family: the village's own school, in the middle of the village. Secondary is less common for a place this size. Hadlow Rural Community School opened in the village in 2013 under the free schools programme, which means some Hadlow teenagers can walk to their secondary instead of spending adolescence on a bus. Neighbouring families look elsewhere too. Wrotham School is the other state secondary on the local list, and Sackville School also appears among nearby options. Around them are the village primaries that serve the surrounding parishes, among them Plaxtol Primary School, and a scatter of Church of England primaries across the wider area, so most families have more than one realistic choice within a short drive.
Schools are one of Hadlow's real strengths: a primary and a secondary of its own, inside a county where most graded schools are good or better.