The schools in Woodford Green are strong enough to be a main reason people move here. Primary pupils do well in their maths tests at eleven. The secondaries get solid results at sixteen. Nearly every graded school in the borough is good or better. Most of the cost of the house is the cost of the schools.
There are six mainstream state primaries in the area, and their pupils average about 107 on the maths test at the end of primary school. Woodford Green Primary School carries the place's name, and Wells Primary School and Oakhill Primary School are among the others nearby. At that level, parents arguing about which of them to choose are arguing over small differences.
The three mainstream state secondaries in the area average an Attainment 8 score of about 61, weighted by pupil numbers. Attainment 8 is the government's measure of results across a pupil's best eight GCSE-level subjects. The schools in the area are Woodford County High School, Woodbridge High School and Trinity Catholic High School. That gives families three different kinds of school within the same few streets, and they line up in very different ways when admissions come round.
Across Redbridge, the whole borough, Ofsted has graded 33 of 35 schools good or better. That is almost all of them. Five of those are outstanding, two require improvement and none are inadequate. Another 29 settings in the borough have no published grade yet, and their absence from the count says nothing about how good they are. A borough where the worst published grade is "requires improvement", and only twice, leaves parents with less to worry about than they usually find.
Living near one of these schools does not secure a place at it. Redbridge Council allocates places by its published admissions rules, and the faith and selective schools in any area set their own criteria on top. The one check worth doing is to read the council's admissions rules for the specific school you want and see which criteria last year's places went on. Plenty of families buy the house and then read the rules. A smaller number read the rules and then buy the house, and their children usually get the place.
The schools are one of Woodford Green's real strengths. The hard part is getting a child into the one you chose, and most families do worse at that than the schools do at teaching.