Rotherhithe's schools are very good, and so is the rest of the borough's list. Nearly every graded school locally is rated good or outstanding. About a third of those are outstanding. Only one needs to improve, and none are failing. The hard part here is getting the place, because the quality is already there.
Ofsted has graded 47 schools across Southwark, and 46 of them are good or better, which leaves almost nothing on the borough's register to steer away from. Fifteen are outstanding and 31 good. One requires improvement, and none are inadequate. Another 41 settings have no published grade yet. Those are waiting for an inspection, and the lack of a grade says nothing about how good they are. With odds like that, the risk of ending up somewhere poor is small. The risk of ending up somewhere other than your first choice is the one that keeps parents awake.
Most of the primaries carry the district's history in their names. Rotherhithe Primary School has the place's own name. Redriff Primary, City of London Academy, uses Redriff, one of the old names for Rotherhithe Street, a road that has been called more things over the centuries than most children get called in a playground. Alfred Salter Primary School is also in the district. For secondary, Bacon's College is the nearest large option for the peninsula, and St Michael's Catholic College and Harris Academy Bermondsey are on the Bermondsey side. Southwark allocates places under its published admissions rules, so a flat that looks across at a school's playground does not come with a seat in its classrooms, and faith schools such as St Michael's use their own criteria as well. Ask Southwark's admissions team how far from each gate the last offer went in recent years, and do it while you are still choosing between flats. With almost everything rated well, the fight here is over distance, and a few hundred metres of Rotherhithe Street can decide it.
Rotherhithe's schools are one of its real strengths, and they are good enough that parents worry less about quality than about whether the admissions map has room for them.