Excellent, and getting a place is the hard part. Every school with a grade in the borough is good or better. Ten are outstanding. None sit at the bottom of the scale. In Ham the school is the easy choice, and the admissions letter decides whether you get it.
Ofsted has graded 25 schools across Richmond upon Thames, and all 25 are rated good or better, a clean sweep with nothing in the lower grades. Ten of those are outstanding, and none are rated requires improvement or inadequate. Another 25 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, and that tells a parent nothing either way. These counts cover the whole borough, so they describe the standard a Ham family can expect from the council's schools in general. Parents here tend to argue about which outstanding school to choose, and that is the kind of argument parents in most of London would gladly have.
Places go by the council's published admissions rules, and buying near a particular gate does not guarantee a seat behind it. Distance counts, so do siblings, and the church schools on the list have faith criteria of their own. Check the exact address against last year's allocations for the school you actually want, because the borough's record is excellent but your child's offer letter covers a single school. With every graded school in the borough at good or better, the scramble is over which good school, and that makes it no calmer.
Grey Court School is the secondary Ham can call its own. Its grounds hold Grey Court House, a Georgian Grade II listed building now called Newman House after Cardinal Newman, who lived there as a boy in the early 19th century. It also shares the tennis courts on the south avenue to Ham House with the Ham and Petersham Lawn Tennis Club. Christ's Church of England Comprehensive Secondary School is the other secondary on the local list. Among the primaries, St Richard's Church of England Primary School shares its name with one of Ham's four churches, and Meadlands Primary School and St Elizabeth's Catholic Primary School are on the same local list. Independent options such as King's House School and Thomas's College are within reach for families who would rather pay fees than read admissions rules. Cardinal Newman is the most famous name connected with Grey Court, and he lived in the house well before anyone taught a lesson in it.
The schools are one of Ham's real strengths, as good as anything in the borough. The only difficulty is getting a place.