Schools are the best thing about Hayes. Almost every school in the borough that inspectors have graded is good or better. The local primaries do well on maths. The secondaries are solid. Getting a place is the hard part, since the grades are this good.
The nine state primary schools in the area average about 107 on the end-of-primary maths test. Hayes Primary School has the place's name on the gate and some history behind it: it opened in 1937, and the old village school on Hayes Street became a church hall. Keston Church of England Primary School serves the Keston side, and Highfield Infants' and Highfield Junior take children through the two halves of primary separately. The rest are a similar mix of community and church schools.
The four state secondary schools in the area average about 47 on Attainment 8, the measure built from a pupil's best eight subjects at the end of Year 11. Hayes School is the obvious local option, and Ravens Wood School and The Ravensbourne School are both options for families looking a little further out. That average is solid, though below the top primary results. Some of the families who chose this area for its primaries will find out in Year 10 how much they really cared about the secondary.
Bromley's council area as a whole has 41 schools with a published Ofsted grade, and 40 of them are good or outstanding. Fifteen of those are outstanding, one requires improvement, and none is inadequate. Other settings have not yet been inspected and have no grade at all, which is a different thing from a poor one. Every figure in this paragraph covers the whole borough, so the outstanding count does not belong to Hayes alone, and neither does the one school that requires improvement.
When the schools are this good, places are what everyone competes for. Bromley council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so living near Hayes Primary or Hayes School does not mean your child gets a place there. Find last year's admissions data for the schools you want and check how far from the gate the last child offered a place lived, because that distance changes from year to year. Parents in Hayes tend to look up a school's last allocation distance before they look at the house's floor plan.
Schools are what Hayes does best, and the strongest reason for a family to move here, provided the admissions rules put your street inside the line.