Maidstone's schools are good, and Kent's admissions system makes sure nobody finds that restful. Nine in ten graded schools across the county are good or better. Grammar schools and non-selective secondaries sit side by side in the same town. Living nearby guarantees nothing. The schools are the easy part, and the admissions paperwork is where parents go grey.
Ofsted has given a published overall grade to 245 settings across Kent, and 221 of them are rated good or better, which comes to about nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. At the other end, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. These counts cover the whole of Kent, not only Maidstone, so they tell you the county standard rather than how any particular school round the corner is doing. Settings that haven't been inspected yet, or hold no published grade, are left out of those totals entirely, which isn't a comment on them either way.
A school's name on a list is not a place at that school. Admissions depend on each school's own rules, and in a county with grammar schools, the rules for those schools are different from the rules for the non-selective school down the road. Before buying for a school, check that school's current admissions criteria and how places were allocated in recent years. A house on the right street is only the first hurdle, and the letter in spring doesn't care how much extra you paid for it.
The names that come up most often say a good deal about the town. Maidstone Grammar School was founded in 1549, taught by William Golding and attended by Lord Beeching. That's a lot of history for a building whose most pressing concern each year is still the entrance test. Invicta Grammar School is another of the town's selective options. Valley Park School and Cornwallis Academy are among the non-selective secondaries, and they're where plenty of families find the school they wanted all along, once they've got the grammar question out of their system. For primaries, Loose Primary School is one example of the village schools on the town's southern edge. Beyond those, the wider area has a long list of primaries and a handful of other secondaries spread between the town and the surrounding villages, which gives families real choice and gives admissions officers plenty of preference forms to sort through.
Schools are one of Maidstone's real strengths. The standard across the county is high and the choice in town is wide, so the effort goes into getting a place rather than finding a decent school.