Good, and unusually self-contained for a town this size. There is a primary in the town and a secondary a short walk from it, so the school run for most families here is measured in minutes rather than junctions. The county's inspection record is strong, with the overwhelming majority of graded settings rated good or better. A handful of nearby village primaries widen the choice for anyone happy to drive. The unglamorous version of the answer is that you can raise a child from four to sixteen in Callington without ever leaving the parish, which is more than a lot of Cornish towns can say.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them are rated good or outstanding, so roughly four in five carry a positive grade. Three of those hold outstanding. Twenty require improvement and five are rated inadequate, which is the part nobody mentions in the estate agent's blurb, and it is why the county number is a starting point rather than the answer. A further 113 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they are academies awaiting a first inspection or because they fall outside the graded regime. Those are not bad schools, they are simply unmeasured, and folding them into the count would be dishonest arithmetic. All of this covers the whole local authority, not the town, so treat it as the weather across Cornwall rather than the forecast for one street.
Callington Primary School is the one carrying the town's name, and Callington Community College is the secondary, sitting behind Marshfield Parc where the town's football teams play. That proximity is the practical fact of family life here. The badminton club plays in the college sports hall on Friday evenings, which tells you how much the school functions as civic infrastructure rather than just a building children are sent to.
For anyone in the outlying parts of the parish, or anyone who fancies a smaller intake, Stoke Climsland School and Harrowbarrow Primary Academy are the village options within reach. Both are the sort of small rural primary where the staff know every family by name and the car park at pickup time is a social event. That is either the thing you moved here for or the thing you will find slightly claustrophobic, and you will know which within a term.
None of this guarantees a place. Living near a school in Cornwall gets you into the admissions conversation, not through the gate. Oversubscription criteria decide allocations, distance is only one of several tests applied, and boundaries are set by the admissions authority rather than by whichever house you happened to view on a sunny Saturday. Buyers who check the current admissions arrangements before they offer save themselves the specific misery of finding out in the spring. Buyers who assume the nearest school is theirs by right are the ones writing furious posts in April.
Schools are one of the strongest cards Callington holds. A town of this size with its own primary, its own secondary and a county inspection record this solid has quietly solved a problem that costs families elsewhere a fortune in postcode premiums.