stronger schools in which London Boroughs?

[sameyeam]

Are there boroughs that have stronger schools than others in London? Besides going down the list of all the schools and seeing OFSTED reports, is there a general understanding on the street which areas have solid schools? I am looking more at primary, but please do comment upon secondaries as well.

I believe Richmond Upon Thames has the best primary schools in London.( I only know because the council bleats on about it every year when the results come out and always fails to mention how weak some of our secondary schools are!)

Barnet is pretty strong amongst London boroughs:

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Tower Hamlet's schools are generally well regarded.

Many do great things for children with well below average starting points and possibly not the home advantages that more children have in wealthier boroughs.

Pricey to live there, though.

Isnt it also about whether it is possible to live in catchment - I also live in richmond and know that it's pretty tight for some schools as to where you live whether you get in. This affects availability/affordability of housing stock obviously .

Tower Hamlet schools are not so well regarded for children who do not have lower than average styarting points!Resources tend tobe concentrated on "diadvanteged" children at the expense of those who can already spaek English,etc

That's not true.

Nearly all TH primaries are comfortably over the floor target with at least average progression.

www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/group.pl?qtype=LA&superview=pri&view=aat&set=1&tab=1&no=211&sort=l.schname&ord=asc

And, yes, you're right, Gigondas.

It's possible to live in a borough with 'good schools' but have a negative experience due to catchment or other issues.

And vice versa, of course.

Second Barnet.

I live in Kingston, which also has a reputation for having good primary schools.

However, as Rosebud points out, unless you live very near these good schools you can end up missing out completely and end up with no school offer at all, just being put at the end of a lot of very long waiting lists.

Kingston seems to rely on a lot of parents here going private and don't even try to provide primary school places for some areas, including mine. When I phoned the schools dept when looking for primary for my DD, they quite happily told me "you aren't in the catchment area for ANY of our schools, everyone in your area goes private". So that's what we had to do.

We were luckier with secondary and she got a place at the very good local girls comp, the best school in the borough, and we are very pleased with it. But we are very close to the edge of the catchment area and could easily have just missed out. If we had missed out we would have been outside the catchment area for all the other schools in the borough and probably would have been left without an offer of a place yet again. Hopefully this situation will be eased a bit when the proposed new secondary is built, but there is no prospect of an improvement in the primary places situation.

It really makes me mad that our LA quite happily plans to not provide school places for large areas of the borough and we are forced to go private.

That's awful, carrot. Someone will come along and tell you that LA's have a legal responsibility to offer you a school place if you apply but, realistically, what they offer may be a long way away in an unpopular school, so not what you'd like anyway.

It is estimated that there will be 70,000 shortfall (yes, seventy thousand) of reception places in London over the next 4 years.

LAs are no longer allowed to build new schools, so there will be more bulge classes, free schools and academies.

Barnet.

Choose your area of Barnet carefully. There are some great private schools in the borough but the secondary provision is patchy. We live in Edgware and had to choose a faith school in order to find a decent school.