Woodford's schools are the best thing about it, and the reason the house prices make sense. Nearly every graded school in the borough is good or better. None is failing. The local primaries post strong maths results. Getting a place is harder than getting a good school.
There are 4 mainstream state primaries in the area, and their pupils average a score of about 109 in end-of-primary maths. Several of them come as infant and junior pairs. Churchfields Infants' feeds Churchfields Junior, and Oakdale Infants' feeds Oakdale Junior, so a family can settle a child at four and not think about the next move until the child is eleven. Nightingale Primary and Snaresbrook Primary complete the state picture. Snaresbrook Prep School is the fee-paying option for parents who would rather write a cheque than read an admissions policy.
Redbridge, the borough as a whole, has 35 schools and settings with a published Ofsted grade, and 33 of them are rated good or outstanding. That covers almost all of them. Five are outstanding, 2 require improvement and none is inadequate. Another 29 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, which is a gap in the paperwork with no verdict either way. Because these counts are borough-wide, a parent in Woodford is choosing from a well-stocked shop without being allowed to pick any shelf they like.
Redbridge council allocates places under its published admissions rules, so buying a house near Churchfields or Oakdale secures a short walk and nothing else. Read the council's admissions criteria for the specific school, and the distance at which the last place went in recent years, alongside the survey. On the Department for Transport's 2019 model, the nearest primary is about a nine-minute walk from the typical Woodford home. The nearest secondary is about 18 minutes on foot, 16 on public transport and 11 by car. A nine-minute walk to a school a child cannot get into is still nine minutes, plus the drive to the one they can.
Children who walked to an infant school in under ten minutes tend to find that secondary school is the point where the Central line joins the morning. The secondary walk takes twice as long as the primary one, and a parent's opinion of the bus timetable sours at the same rate.
For schools, Woodford is about as strong as a buyer could hope for. The quality is there, and what decides the outcome is the admissions rules, not the school's grade.