West Drayton's schools are one of the best things about the place. Nine state primaries around here. Nearly every graded school in the borough is good or better. None is rated inadequate. Parents get a better deal from the classroom than from the high street.
The nine mainstream state primaries in the area averaged a scaled score of about 105 in maths in the end-of-primary tests. One of them carries the town's name, West Drayton Academy, and Laurel Lane Primary School, Cherry Lane Primary School and St Martin's Church of England Primary School all serve the town itself. St Martin's takes its name from the parish church, the one building in West Drayton that has outlasted every lord of the manor. Out towards the airport there is Heathrow Primary School, which may be the only school in the country whose name doubles as a holiday destination. The children in those classrooms grow up knowing the difference between the arrivals and the departures before they can spell either.
Ofsted rates 35 of Hillingdon's 38 graded schools as good or outstanding, which is almost all of them. Seven are outstanding, three require improvement and none is inadequate. Those counts cover the whole of the London Borough of Hillingdon, so they say how the borough's schools perform overall, and any one building can be better or worse than that. Another 44 settings have no published grade yet and are left out of those counts, which means only that they have not been graded.
Living close to a school is a start and nothing more. Hillingdon Council allocates places under its published admissions rules, and buying a house within sight of Laurel Lane's gates gives a child no right to a place there; distance is one criterion among several, with siblings and, for St Martin's and St Catherine Catholic Primary School, faith criteria also counting. Ask the council for the distance at which last year's final place was offered at the school you want, since that figure moves every year and decides more than the school's prospectus does. Parents in West Drayton tend to learn the admissions rules better than they learn the bus routes.
For secondary school the area is less precisely mapped, and no state secondary inside the town can be named here, so families should look at the borough's options as a whole and the council's rules for each.
The schools are the part of West Drayton that has kept up with the station. A family moving here for the Elizabeth line will get far more than it bargained for out of the primaries.