Hampton's schools are excellent, and the parents here behave as if they were in doubt. Every graded school is good or better. Four in ten are outstanding. Two famous selective independents are in the town itself. The real competition is getting in.
Richmond upon Thames, the authority these counts cover, has 25 schools and settings with a published Ofsted grade, and all 25 are good or better. That is every one of them. Ten are rated outstanding and 15 good, and none requires improvement or is inadequate. Another 25 settings have no published grade yet, either because they are new or because they have not been inspected under the current system. They are missing from the count, and nothing more should be read into it.
Hampton's own primaries do most of the work for families on the south side. Hampton Infant School and Nursery and Hampton Junior School carry the town's name. St Mary's Hampton Church of England Primary is near the old village church. Hampton Hill Junior School serves the streets to the north. Places at all of them go by the council's published admissions rules, so a house round the corner from a good primary does not come with a seat in reception. The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about seven minutes' walk from the average home. Those seven minutes count for less than where a house falls under the admissions rules, and parents work this out when they read the allocation letters.
For secondary, Hampton High is the state option in the town, about a 16-minute walk from the average home on the same 2019 modelling, or 14 minutes by public transport. Then there are Hampton School for boys and Lady Eleanor Holles School for girls, both selective and fee-paying. Most of the area's school-run traffic seems to be heading to one or the other. For a good share of Hampton's families, the decision at eleven is an entrance exam and a fee bill. The council's admissions rules never come into it.
Ask Richmond upon Thames for the distance at which each school offered its last place in recent years, and plot your target streets against it. That distance moves from year to year, and listings that mention being near a school say nothing about it.
Schooling is one of Hampton's real strengths. The hard part is getting a place.