The schools here are one of the better reasons to move to this part of Cornwall. Most graded settings across the county come out good or better. A few are outstanding. The nearest primary is a short walk from most front doors, and the secondary sits close enough that the school run is a walk rather than a logistics operation. A town built on hard-rock engineering has ended up with an unglamorous, functional, reliably decent education offer, which is entirely in character.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, of which 95 are good or better, so roughly four in five carry a good grade or higher. Three are rated outstanding. Twenty sit at requires improvement and five at inadequate, which is the honest bit most area guides bury. A further 113 settings have no published grade at all, either because they have not been inspected under the current framework or because they are not graded that way, and those should not be read as either good or bad. Those counts cover the whole of Cornwall rather than Camborne alone, so they describe the authority a family would be joining rather than the specific street they might buy on.
Naming a school is not the same as getting into it. Admissions in Cornwall are run by the local authority and the individual academies rather than by proximity alone, and a house within sight of the gates guarantees nothing at all. Places are allocated year by year, oversubscription criteria change, and the family who assumed the walk to school was the same thing as a place at the school tends to find out in the spring. Check the current admissions arrangements for the specific year of entry before letting a school choose your postcode for you.
The secondary is Camborne Science and International Academy, which is a considerable quantity of name for one school and, for a town that supplied hard-rock engineers to the world, not an unearned one. It has been the town's main secondary since the 1950s, absorbing the old local grammar when Cornwall went comprehensive in the 1970s. There is also further education provision in the town, so post-sixteen options do not require leaving on day one.
At primary level, Trevithick Learning Academy carries the name of the engineer whose steam locomotive made Camborne famous, while St Meriadoc Church of England Infant Academy and its junior counterpart borrow theirs from the saint the parish church is dedicated to. A town that names its schools after a Cornish saint and a steam engineer has told you most of what you need to know about its two halves. Beyond those, the wider area is served by village primaries at Kehelland, Penponds, Troon and Crowan, plus a cluster of town schools including Roskear, Rosemellin, Weeth and the Catholic primary, which between them mean that almost every neighbourhood has a primary within reach rather than a commute.
On the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling, a typical primary is around nine minutes on foot and a secondary about 22 minutes, or roughly 20 by public transport. Those walking figures hold up better than the bus ones, which age with the timetable.
For a town that is cheap by any Cornish measure, the schooling is the part that refuses to be cheap with it. Education is among the stronger things Camborne has going for it, and the families who work out the admissions rules early are the ones who get the benefit.