Strong, and the admissions letter is the hard part. Nine in ten graded schools across Kent are rated good or better. The town has one mixed state secondary and a Christian free school. Its most famous school is older than the printing press. Parents here don't lose sleep over whether the schools are good. They lose it over whether the right one will say yes.
Ofsted has graded 245 schools across Kent, and 221 of them are good or better, about nine in every ten. Of those, 38 are outstanding. At the other end, 21 require improvement and three are inadequate. These counts cover the whole of Kent County Council's area, not Sevenoaks on its own, so treat them as the county's standard rather than the town's private score. A further 255 settings hold no published grade at all yet; they aren't counted here, and that says nothing about their quality either way.
A good school down the road isn't a place at it. Admissions run on the council's criteria and each school's own oversubscription rules, and none of it pays attention to how much you paid for the house. The buyer who picks a street because it sounds close to a school, and never checks how admissions have fallen in recent years, is the one opening a disappointing email in spring. Check with the school and the council before you exchange, not after.
On the state side, the secondary story is short. Knole Academy is the town's one mixed state secondary, created in 2009 by merging a boys' school and a girls' school, which settled one argument in the town and kept every other one running. Trinity School, a Christian free school on the north-eastern edge of town, gives families a second option. For primaries, Lady Boswell's Church of England Voluntary Aided Primary School traces its roots to a 1675 bequest to educate twelve poor scholars. Sevenoaks house prices have since made sure that describing any local child as a poor scholar would take some explaining. Around the edges, village primaries in Otford, Kemsing, Seal, Dunton Green and Sevenoaks Weald serve the surrounding villages.
Then there's the independent sector, which is louder here than in most towns. Sevenoaks School was founded in 1432 by William Sevenoke, a foundling raised in the town who went on to become Mayor of London, and it is now a co-educational boarding and day school. Walthamstow Hall and The Granville School sit alongside it, with a spread of prep schools beyond. Seal Hollow Road also became the site of a controversial grammar school annexe, which tells you the argument about selection in this town never ended. It just moved further along the road.
Schools are one of the town's real strengths. The quality is there. What families actually fight over is getting a place.