Marylebone's state schools are excellent. The handful of primaries do well, and the one secondary does very well. Every school the inspectors have graded across the borough is good or better. The schools are excellent here, and the competition for places is fierce.
The three mainstream state primaries in the area average 112 on the key stage 2 maths measure. Hampden Gurney CofE Primary School, St Mary's Bryanston Square CofE School and St Vincent's Catholic Primary School are the names in and around Marylebone. With three schools sharing one average, each school's own results are on the Department for Education's performance tables, and they are the ones to read.
At secondary level, the one mainstream state secondary in the area has a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of 61. The St Marylebone CofE School is the local secondary, and a score of 61 is a high one for a state comprehensive. Parents in the area who were about to pay private fees have been known to recalculate.
Ofsted has graded 25 settings across Westminster as a whole. All 25 are good or better, nine of them outstanding, and none requires improvement or is inadequate. Another 18 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, so they are left out of that count. A clean record like that across a whole borough is rarer than the brochures make it sound.
None of this secures a place. Westminster's published admissions rules decide who gets in, and three of the four schools named here are church schools, which set their own admission criteria on top of those rules. Read the admissions policy of each school you want for the year your child applies, because living round the corner from Bryanston Square counts for less than buyers expect. The four schools all have saints or churches in their names, and their admissions policies tend to come with conditions attached.
The private schools fill the rest of the map. Queen's College London, Wetherby Preparatory School and Wetherby Senior School are all on the local list, and for the child who would sooner be on stage than in a classroom, so is Sylvia Young Theatre School.
The schools are among the best things about Marylebone. What a family really competes for here is a place in one of them, and a home close enough to the gate.