Mayfair's schools are excellent, and the inspection record around them is spotless. Every graded school across the borough is good or better. The area has a single state primary of its own. Its pupils post strong maths results. What Mayfair runs short of is the children.
Primary education inside Mayfair comes down to one state school, St George's Hanover Square CofE Primary School, the only mainstream state primary in the area. Its pupils averaged a scaled score of 108 in key stage 2 maths. One school makes for a short list. For a family that wants a state primary within walking distance of a Mayfair front door, that list starts and ends with St George's.
The wider picture is cleaner than inspection records usually get. Ofsted has published grades for 25 schools and settings across Westminster, the authority these counts cover, and all 25 are rated good or better, nine of them outstanding and 16 good. None requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 18 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, which tells a parent nothing either way. Inspectors who find nothing to complain about across an entire borough are rarer than a parking space on Grosvenor Square.
Places are handed out by the council's published admissions rules and each school's own oversubscription criteria, and neither cares which square a family's flat overlooks, so buying near St George's secures nothing on its own. The practical check is the school's admissions policy and how far its last offers reached, read alongside Westminster's allocation rules. With so few families in Mayfair, a buyer is competing for a seat with children from right across the borough, and the council counts them all the same.
The other names on the local list say more about the postcode than about the state system. London Park School Mayfair and London Park School Sixth, Eifa International School and Southbank International School Westminster all appear among the schools in and around the area, and the University of Westminster keeps the education going well past eighteen. Couples with children make up about 8% of Mayfair's households, so the district holds more schools with its name on the door than it does families to fill them.
Schooling is one of Mayfair's real strengths, and the hard part is getting a child a place in one of them.