Lots of choice, and no current inspection grades on the dashboard to break the tie. The postcode area carries about twenty-nine state primaries and five state secondary options, alongside three independent day prep schools, two special-needs schools, a further-education college and a university. No school in this brief comes with a published inspection grade attached. Plenty of doors, no shortcut to picking the right one.
State primaries are spread across the cathedral city itself and the surrounding villages. The named options inside or close to the city include Jessie Younghusband Primary School, Kingsham Primary School, Parklands Community Primary School, Portfield Primary Academy, Rumboldswhyke CofE Primary School, St Richard's Catholic Primary School, St. Joseph's CofE Junior School and St. Joseph's Infant School, with Boxgrove CofE Primary School, Eastergate CofE Primary School, Lavant Primary School, North Mundham Primary School, Fishbourne CofE Primary School, Funtington Primary School, Tangmere Primary Academy and others fanning out across the wider postcode. A meaningful share are church-affiliated, which is the cathedral-city pattern showing up in the school registers as well as on the skyline.
State secondaries are a much shorter list. The named options are Bishop Luffa School, Chichester High School (which formed in 2016 from the merger of the boys' and girls' schools), Chichester Free School (which runs primary and secondary phases on the same site), Ormiston Six Villages Academy out at Eastergate, and The Academy, Selsey further south on the peninsula. Five secondaries for a cathedral postcode and the villages that feed it, with families on the rural fringe often driving to one of them rather than to the nearest school gate.
Independent options are mostly prep-stage. The three named day prep schools are Oakwood School, The Prebendal School (the cathedral school, where William Juxon was schooled in the late sixteenth century before going on to Oxford and eventually the Archbishopric of Canterbury after the Restoration) and Westbourne House School. Great Ballard School and Littlegreen Academy show up in the wider list. Special-needs provision in the area includes Fordwater School and St Anthony's School. Higher and further education runs through the Chichester College Group and the University of Chichester, which was granted degree-awarding status in 2005.
A note on catchments. Naming a school does not guarantee a place at it. Cathedral-city postcodes get studied carefully by parents working backwards from a preferred school, and the answer is rarely a clean line drawn on a map. The catchment for a popular state primary can shrink in a year of strong demand and stretch in a quieter one, and a secondary that took every applicant five years ago may not be taking them this September. Anyone making a buying decision on a specific school should check the year-by-year admissions distances with the local authority before exchanging contracts, not after.
So: lots of named options across the cathedral city and the surrounding villages, no current inspection grades on file to rank them, and a tilt towards church-affiliated state schools that any buyer should expect to find. Average, on the data, which is what the absence of inspection grades tends to look like in summary form. The detailed answer lives in the inspection reports and the admissions offices, neither of which this page is.