The schools are good, but the secondaries are a drive away. Most of the county's graded schools are good or better. The village has one primary school of its own. Secondary school means a bus, a lift or a long walk. You get the good grades along with a lot of driving at quarter past eight.
Ofsted has graded 122 schools and other settings across West Sussex, and 103 of them are good or outstanding. That is well over four in five. Eleven are outstanding, 17 require improvement and two are inadequate. These counts cover the whole county, not just Crawley Down, so they describe the pool the village draws from rather than the village itself. Another 125 settings hold no published overall grade yet and are left out of those numbers, which says nothing about whether they are any good.
The village's own primary is Crawley Down Village CofE School, attached to the church and part of village life since the nineteenth century. The Department for Transport's modelled times from 2019 put the nearest primary about 10 minutes' walk from the typical home, or about seven minutes by car. For primary-age children, the school run can be done on foot. Turners Hill Church of England Primary School serves the smaller village just to the south, which this page also covers.
Secondary school is where the car comes out. The village has no secondary school, and the list of nearby secondaries includes Hazelwick School and Oriel High School, which are outside the village. The same 2019 model puts the nearest secondary about 23 minutes away by public transport, 13 by car and nearly an hour on foot. Plenty of parents choose the house by the primary and then find out the secondary question comes with a timetable. The other secondaries and primaries on the nearby list are mostly further out.
Being near a school is not the same as getting a place at it. Admissions are decided by the council's criteria, which usually weigh distance, siblings and, for church schools, their own faith criteria, and none of that is settled by the address on your sale particulars. Buyers who assume the nearest school is their school sometimes discover otherwise when the offer letter arrives in spring. Check the admissions policy of each school you care about, and the most recent distances offered, before the survey rather than after completion.
Schools are one of Crawley Down's strengths: the county's graded schools are overwhelmingly good or better, and the village primary is a walk away. The catch is secondary school, which means a daily journey out of the village for every family.