The schools around Herne Hill are good, and the borough's record says so plainly. Nearly nine in ten graded schools are good or outstanding. A primary is a few minutes' walk from most homes. A secondary is not much further. The hard part is getting a place at the one you picked, which is a separate problem from whether the schools are any good.
Ofsted has graded 41 schools across Lambeth, the borough that covers most of Herne Hill, and 35 of them are good or outstanding, which is about 85%. Eleven hold the top grade and 24 are rated good. Five require improvement and one is rated inadequate. A further 32 settings in the borough have no published grade yet and are left out of those counts. For a London borough the inadequate pile is short, and the outstanding pile is long enough to argue over.
Distance is not much of an issue either. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, from 2019, put the nearest primary about 6 minutes' walk from the average home and the nearest secondary about 11 minutes. Children here get to secondary school without a bus pass and a packed lunch for the journey. Those times measure the nearest school, though, and the nearest is often not the one a child is offered.
Places are allocated under the council's published admissions rules, and living round the corner from a school does not put a child in it, however close the front door looks on a map. Herne Hill sits on the line between Lambeth and Southwark, so it is worth checking which council your application would go through, because that depends on which side of the boundary the house falls. The two church primaries, St Jude's Church of England Primary School and St Saviour's Church of England Primary School, may also weigh faith criteria that a council school does not. Families who expect proximity to decide everything tend to find out in the spring, with an offer letter in their hand, that the rules ranked their child on something else.
Among the other primaries nearby are Jessop Primary School and Judith Kerr Primary School. For secondary, Ark Evelyn Grace Academy and The Charter School North Dulwich are both on the list, and Herne Hill School carries the district's name. The rest of the local choice runs through the wider Lambeth list above. Whatever these schools do well, the trickiest part of the system is the paperwork, which no Ofsted inspector has ever been sent to grade.
Schools are one of Herne Hill's real strengths, with a strong borough record and short walks to the gate. The admissions rules ask more of parents than the schools do of their children.