Homerton's schools are very good, and the borough they belong to has no weak ones on its graded list at all. Every graded school is good or outstanding. About a third are outstanding. None needs to improve. The hard part is getting a place, not finding a good school.
Ofsted has graded 40 schools across the London Borough of Hackney, and all 40 are good or outstanding. That's every one of them. Fourteen are outstanding, 26 are good, and none is rated requires improvement or inadequate. Another 24 settings in Hackney have no published grade yet, which means they are newer or still waiting for an inspection. It says nothing about their quality. The figures cover the whole borough, but in a borough where nothing graded falls below good, Homerton's share of it can't be hiding much.
Distances are short. The Department for Transport's modelling, from 2019, puts the nearest primary about five minutes' walk from the average home and the nearest secondary about nine. Places are allocated by Hackney Council under its published admissions rules, so living near a school, even next door to it, does not guarantee a place, and the outcome depends on things like how oversubscribed the school is and where the cut-off fell the year you apply. The council publishes how far away the last child admitted to each school lived, and that's the figure to look up for any school a house is meant to be near. A five-minute walk is no use if the cut-off was four.
Two secondaries are part of Homerton's own history. Cardinal Pole Catholic School is in the building of the old French Protestant Hospital, which is now listed. The City Academy, Hackney also serves the area, and Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy is on the southern side towards South Hackney. Kingsmead Primary School and Berger Primary School are among the primaries close by. Being a faith school means Cardinal Pole sets its own admissions criteria, so for some families the deciding question is the church they attend, not the distance from their front door. The old hospital took in refugees long before it took in Year 7s.
Three nearby schools have closed recently, including a Catholic primary and a college, so older maps and school-finder results may still list options that no longer exist. The open schools are in walking distance, and every graded one in the borough is good or better.
The schools are one of Homerton's real strengths. Admission is what's competitive here, and the quality of the schools isn't in doubt.