Harrow Weald's schools are the best thing about it, by some distance. Nearly every graded school in the borough is good or outstanding. Primary pupils here finish comfortably above the expected standard in maths. The secondaries hold up at sixteen as well. Picking a school is the easy part; the admissions letter decides the rest.
There are 14 mainstream state primaries in and around Harrow Weald, and their pupils average about 107 in the Key Stage 2 maths test, where 100 marks the expected standard. That is a group of schools working comfortably above the line it is measured against. Weald Rise Primary School is the one carrying the area's name, with Kenmore Park Junior School and Glebe Primary School among the others nearby. A child who can recite their times tables by Year 6 is, around here, roughly what the system expects.
The seven mainstream state secondaries in the area average about 55 on Attainment 8, the measure of results across a pupil's best eight subjects at sixteen, weighted by the number of pupils sitting them. Hatch End High School and the Salvatorian Roman Catholic College are two of the nearer names. The figure describes the group as a whole, so one strong school and one weaker one can sit behind the same average, and the individual school's own published results are the number that counts for a particular child.
Harrow, as a local authority, has 28 of its 29 graded schools rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, which is all but one. Nine of those are outstanding, one requires improvement and none is inadequate. Those counts cover the whole borough, so they describe the system a Harrow Weald family is applying into more than the handful of schools at the end of the road. A borough where the weakest graded school is merely "requires improvement" is one where parents have to work quite hard to find something to complain about.
Places are handed out under Harrow Council's published admissions rules, and living near a named school does nothing to secure a seat in it, however close it looks on the map. Faith schools set their own criteria on top, and oversubscribed schools fill on the council's rules, not on which family moved in most recently. The council publishes how far away the last child offered a place at each primary lived in recent years, and that distance for the school you want is the one to look up when weighing a house. The cleverest buyers in Harrow Weald are the ones who read the allocation table before they read the floor plan.
For schools, Harrow Weald is one of the best bets in this part of London, and the only real competition is for a place.