The Office for Standards In Education (Ofsted) is the governmental department responsible for inspecting schools in the UK. Ofsted visits a school, writes a report and gives it a grade between 1 (outstanding) and 4 (inadequate). The interesting part is that these results are all made public.
We took the latest Ofsted report on all of London’s “maintained” schools (i.e. state schools) on the primary and secondary level and counted how many schools graded “outstanding” there are in each borough compared to its number of households.
The result shows that Harrow comes up on top with 3.6 excellent schools per 10,000 households. On the other end of the scale is Bexely with only 0.86 outstanding schools per 10,000 households.
So if you have kids and are moving to (or within) London, the above graph is one way to start your search. Having said that, I live in Islington because we like French restaurants and the Almeida theatre. So the Ofsted data doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story about a neighbourhood’s quality of life, but it’s certainly a starting point if good schools are important to you.