The schools in Richmond are very good, and the borough has no weak ones on the books. Every graded school around here is good or outstanding. The local primaries beat the expected standard in maths. The nearest secondary is a longer trip than the nearest primary. The schools are the easy bit of moving here, and the hard bit is the house next to one.
There are three mainstream state primaries in the area, and their pupils averaged a scaled score of about 106 in the Key Stage 2 maths test. Darell Primary and Nursery School, Kew Riverside Primary School and The King's Church of England Primary School are among the primaries serving Richmond, Kew and North Sheen. The Department for Transport's 2019 model puts the nearest primary about eight minutes' walk from a typical home. Children here can be late for school only through effort.
Ofsted has published grades for 25 schools and settings in Richmond upon Thames, the authority these counts cover, and all 25 are good or better. Ten of them are outstanding, and none is rated requires improvement or inadequate. Other settings in the borough have no published grade yet and are left out of that count. In this borough, a parent hunting for a school to avoid has nothing to work with.
Places are allocated under Richmond upon Thames council's published admissions rules, so a house round the corner from a good primary improves the odds and secures nothing, and a church school such as The King's can weigh its own criteria on top. The council publishes how far each school's last offer reached in recent years, and that distance is worth laying over the streets on a shortlist. Families who bought for the school gate and skipped that step tend to learn the rules in spring, from a letter.
The secondary picture is further out. The same 2019 model puts the nearest secondary about 22 minutes' walk from a typical home, or about 19 minutes by public transport, so the move from primary to secondary is also a move onto the buses. Around Kew there is a cluster of other schools outside the state primary count, among them Kew Green Preparatory School and Unicorn School, which give parents another option and another set of fees to think about.
Schools are one of Richmond's real strengths, with no weak grades anywhere in the borough's published list. The price of a house close to one is the only obstacle, and the schools themselves never cause it.