Downderry has a primary school carrying the village's name, and for everything after that you get in the car. The nearest secondary is over at Torpoint. Across the county, roughly four in five inspected schools are rated good or better. Very few households here have school-age children in them at all. So the schools question in Downderry is not really about choice. It is about mileage.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them are good or better, which is close to four in five. Three hold the Outstanding grade, 20 require improvement, and 5 are rated inadequate. A further 113 settings carry no published grade, having not been inspected or not been graded, and they belong in neither column. Those are county-wide numbers rather than this village's own, and Cornwall is a very large county, so they describe the general standard a family is buying into rather than the specific school gate they will be standing at.
Proximity guarantees nothing. A school being in the village, or having the village in its name, does not put a child on its roll: places are allocated under the local authority's admissions arrangements, which are published each year and change. Anyone buying on the strength of a particular school should read the current arrangements and last year's allocation outcomes for that exact school before the offer goes in, not after.
The one in the village is St Nicolas', the primary that carries Downderry in its name. Beyond it, the primary options cluster around Torpoint: Antony Church of England School, Carbeile Junior School and Torpoint Nursery and Infant School among them. The nearest secondary is Torpoint Community College. That is the practical set, and it is a short list, which is what happens when a village of this size sits on a coast road rather than a junction.
Distance is the part that shapes daily life. Department for Transport modelling from 2019 puts a primary school at about 9 minutes by car and 28 minutes on foot, which is manageable in either mode. The secondary is a different proposition: about 19 minutes by car, 44 by public transport, and 103 on foot. A 103-minute modelled walk is not a school run, it is an expedition, and the public transport figure is the one to treat most sceptically, since bus services have had years to change since that modelling was done. Families here should assume the secondary years come with a driver, a timetable, or both.
Judged on grades, the schools are among the stronger reasons to be here, with the county's inspected picture solidly good and a village primary on the doorstep. Judged on logistics, they are a standing commitment to the car from roughly age eleven onward.