The schools are the best thing about Wood Green, and by some distance. Nearly every graded school in the borough is rated good or better. The local primaries score well on maths. The secondaries hold their own. For a district best known for its High Road, the classrooms are the surprise.
There are nine mainstream state primaries in the area, and their pupils averaged a Key Stage 2 maths score of about 107 in the latest published results. Lordship Lane Primary School carries the name of the road George Chesser put a blacksmith's shop on in 1770, and Alexandra Primary School and Earlham Primary School are among the others families here weigh up. The primaries are where Wood Green looks most like the parts of north London that charge more for the privilege.
Three mainstream state secondaries serve the area, with a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score of about 49, the average across a pupil's best eight subjects at the end of Year 11. Heartlands High School and Mulberry Academy Woodside are two of them, the second named for the ward that holds a large part of Wood Green. With three to choose from, most families end up deciding between them on which direction they would rather their teenager walked in the rain.
Across Haringey, Ofsted has graded 36 schools, and 35 of them are good or better, almost all of them. Sixteen are outstanding, one requires improvement and none is inadequate. A further 37 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, which says nothing either way about them. The borough has made "good" so ordinary that parents here argue about outstanding instead.
Places are handed out under the council's published admissions rules, and living a short walk from a school does not by itself get a child through the gate. The useful number to ask Haringey's admissions team for is how far from each school last year's furthest place went, because that changes year to year and a front door that made the cut last September can miss it this one. "Walking distance to outstanding schools" can cover 16 of them in this borough, and none of them has signed anything.
Wood Green's schools are one of its real strengths, good enough that families who came for the price of a flat often stay for the primary down the road.