The schools are the easy part of buying in Larkfield. Nine in ten graded settings across Kent are good or better. A primary school sits about ten minutes' walk from the typical home. A secondary is under ten minutes by car. The hard part is getting a place, and that is a separate fight.
Ofsted has graded 245 settings across Kent, and 221 of them are good or better, about nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. At the other end, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Those counts cover the whole county council area, not Larkfield alone, so they describe the system your child enters rather than the building at the end of your road. A further 255 settings hold no published overall grade yet, and they are left out of those figures entirely.
Distance is on your side. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary school about 10 minutes' walk from the typical home, or about 7 minutes by car. The nearest secondary is about 21 minutes on foot, 10 by car and 17 by public transport. Those public transport times come from 2019 and age as bus services change, so check the current timetable before you plan a school run around one.
Names on the local list tell you what the choice looks like. Lunsford Primary School and the Ditton pairing of Ditton Infant School and Ditton Church of England Junior School cover the younger end. For secondary, The Malling School and Aylesford School are the obvious local options, and Maidstone Grammar School for Girls and Oakwood Park Grammar School sit on the same list. Grammar schools on the list mean some parents will spend Year 5 treating the kitchen table as an exam hall. The rest of the list runs to more than two dozen primaries and a handful of other secondaries across the neighbouring villages and Maidstone's western edge.
Buying near a named school does not buy a place at it. Admissions run on published criteria, and a house that looks close on the map can still fall the wrong side of whatever that year's intake produces. Estate agents will describe a property as "near excellent schools" with total confidence and zero liability. Check each school's own admissions rules and recent allocation history before you let a school name set your budget.
For a parent, the schools are the strongest reason to pick Larkfield, and the odds of landing somewhere good are about as reliable as English schooling gets. The admissions letter is still the part nobody can buy.