Good, and better than a town with this few children has any right to expect. About four in five graded schools across the county are rated good or better. Primaries are a short walk from most front doors. The secondaries are close enough that the school run is a choice rather than a sentence. For a place better known for its pensioners than its playgrounds, that is an odd thing to be strong at.
Ofsted has graded 67 schools and settings across East Sussex, and 54 of them are good or better, roughly four in every five. Seven are outstanding and 47 good. At the other end, seven require improvement and six are inadequate, so the county has its weak spots and a parent should check the individual report rather than trusting the average. These are county-wide counts, not a tally of Bexhill's own schools. A further 84 settings hold no published grade yet, which means exactly that: not yet graded, not quietly failing.
Distance is the other half of the story. On the Department for Transport's modelled journey times, from 2019, the typical home is about an 11-minute walk from a primary school and about 22 minutes on foot from a secondary, or roughly 10 minutes by car. The public transport times are older than they look, since bus services change, but the walking distances hold.
A school's name on a map is not a place in its classroom. Admissions run on the council's rules, and a house a few streets from the gate is a better bet than one across town, not a guarantee. The buyers who get caught out are the ones who read the prospectus, viewed the house, and never read the admissions criteria. The offer letter arrives either way.
A few names say something about the town. King Offa Primary Academy takes its name from the Mercian king whose charter is the first written mention of Bexhill, which makes it the only school in the area named after an eighth-century land deal. St Richard's Catholic College carries the name of the Bishop of Chichester who probably ordered the manor house whose ruins still sit in the Old Town, so the religious history of the place has ended up with a sixth form. Bexhill High Academy is the other main secondary, Bexhill College handles the post-16 years, and Little Common School serves the western edge of town. The remaining primaries spread across Sidley, Pebsham and the rest, and every one of them should be judged on its own latest inspection.
There is a historical irony in all of this. Bexhill was once full of independent boarding schools, drawn by its reputation for healthy sea air, and most of them had closed or left in the decades after the Second World War. The town that lost its private schools ended up with a state sector that holds up well against the county.
Schools are one of Bexhill-on-Sea's real strengths. Families who move here will find good options within walking distance, and a lot less competition from other families than a town this well served usually brings.