Good, and the evidence covers the whole of Kent. Nine in ten graded schools are good or better. The village primary is on the doorstep. The secondary means a car journey or a long bus ride. The schools are fine. The drama lives in the admissions letter.
Ofsted has graded 245 schools and settings across Kent, and 221 of them are rated good or outstanding, about nine in ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. At the other end, 21 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. Another 255 settings have no published grade yet. That's a paperwork gap, and it says nothing about quality. The point to hold on to is that every one of these counts covers the whole county authority. They tell you Kent's odds are strong. They can't tell you how the school at the end of your road is doing, and anyone selling a house who says otherwise is selling the house.
Leigh Academy Marden is the primary that carries the village's name. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 15 minutes' walk away, or 7 minutes by car. For a village, that is about as good as the school run gets. Nearby primaries include St Margaret's, Collier Street Church of England Voluntary Controlled School, a few lanes over, and Staplehurst School one village along. Leigh Academy Paddock Wood and Leigh Academy Horsmonden are nearby too. That shared name turns up so often around here that a new parent could mistake it for a franchise, and in branding terms it more or less is one.
Secondary is where the geography starts to bite. The nearest secondary on this list is Leigh Academy Mascalls. The same 2019 modelling puts the nearest secondary about 17 minutes away by car and about 34 minutes by public transport. On foot it's an hour and a half, which counts as a hike, not a walk to school. Families who assume the station solves everything find that the railway line goes to London, not to the secondary school. The Quest School also appears in the area's register, outside the mainstream primary and secondary system.
Being near a school does not get your child into it. Admissions follow each school's published rules, not the estate agent's map, and the Ofsted grades above describe the county, not any one school named here. Before an offer, look up the admission criteria and recent allocation history for the specific schools you want, and read their individual inspection reports. The buyers who skip that step are the ones who find out in spring that the school up the road filled its places without them.
Schooling is one of Marden's genuine strengths. The primary is close, the county's odds are strong, and the only real cost is the drive to secondary school.