Good, and the grammar schools down the road make sure every parent knows it. The primary results come in above the expected mark. The secondaries do well too. Across Kent, nine in ten graded schools are good or better. The one catch is that the village no longer has a secondary school of its own.
Hextable Primary School is the one with the village's name on it, and the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about ten minutes' walk from the typical home. Across the 8 state primaries in the area, the average maths score at key stage 2 is about 104. The rest of the local options are in nearby villages and in Swanley, including St Bartholomew's Catholic Primary School, Swanley, where faith can feature in the admissions rules alongside distance. Arthur Mee, who wrote the Children's Encyclopedia, lived in a villa in Hextable, which puts a fair bit of pressure on the village primary.
The 4 state secondaries in the area average an Attainment 8 score of about 56, weighted by pupil numbers. Hextable's own secondary has closed, so every teenager here now leaves the village for school, with a modelled walk of about 24 minutes to the nearest secondary, 17 by public transport or 10 by car. Wilmington Grammar School for Boys and Wilmington Grammar School for Girls are both nearby, and so are Orchards Academy and Leigh Academy Wilmington, so families can choose between selective and comprehensive schools without much of a drive. Parents round here can usually name both Wilmington grammars faster than they can name their local councillor.
Kent County Council's area as a whole has 221 of its 245 graded schools rated good or better by Ofsted, roughly nine in every ten. That includes 38 rated outstanding, 21 requiring improvement and 3 inadequate. Those are county-wide counts covering everywhere from the coast to the London fringe, so they tell you about the system Hextable's children belong to and nothing about any one classroom.
Kent County Council allocates places using its published admissions rules, and living close to a school you like does not guarantee a place there, a lesson some families learn on offer day, when the letter names somewhere else. Each year the council publishes how far from the gate the last child offered a place lived, so look that up for any school you are counting on, and look it up for more than one year. Distance rules that look generous on a map can tighten quickly when a year group is large. The families who check those figures early are the ones who never need to appeal.
Schools are among Hextable's strongest suits: solid primary results, secondaries scoring well above the bar, and a selective option close enough that the choice is a real one.