The schools are the easiest thing in New Cross to recommend. Nearly every graded school in the borough clears the inspectors' bar. A handful are rated outstanding. Only one needs to improve, and none has failed. Getting into a school is harder than finding a good one.
Ofsted has graded 35 schools across Lewisham, the borough New Cross belongs to, and 34 of them are good or outstanding, so almost all of them. Four hold the outstanding grade, one is rated requires improvement and none is inadequate. Another 41 settings in the borough have no published overall grade yet, which says nothing either way about how they teach. When 34 of 35 schools clear the bar, the argument at the school gate moves from which school is any good to which one will take your child.
That second question belongs to Lewisham's admissions rules, which the council publishes, and buying a house round the corner from a particular school does not on its own buy a place in it. For any school a family has in mind, the useful check is the council's record of how far from the gate the last child offered a place lived in recent years, and, for church schools, what the faith criteria ask for. Distance helps, but the rules decide, and they are written down for anyone who wants to read them.
The names on the primary school gates are mostly the area's own history. Haberdashers' Hatcham Primary and Haberdashers' Hatcham Free School carry the name of the livery company that owned the manor from the seventeenth century and developed it in the nineteenth, so the Haberdashers' Company has been in the New Cross education business for longer than the railways have been tangling the place up. St James's Hatcham Church of England Primary School keeps the old parish name, with the admissions rules that can come with a church school. Kender Primary School, Childeric Primary School and Edmund Waller Primary School cover the rest of the area.
Older children have Addey and Stanhope School in New Cross itself, and Deptford Green School just over the border. Goldsmiths, University of London, takes some of them at the end, if the parents can bear the noise from the music practice rooms in the meantime.
New Cross does very well on schools: a family buying here can expect a good school within reach, and the work goes into getting the place, because finding a good school is the easy part.