Eastbourne's schools come without current published inspection ratings in the available data. The state secondary list includes Ratton School, St Catherine's College, The Cavendish School, The Eastbourne Academy, The Turing School, and Willingdon Community School. The state primaries cover every quarter of the town. Three independents survive from the Victorian boom and the war years that closed most of the rest. The official picture is silent. The local picture takes legwork.
The catchment caveat matters more here than it does in towns where the grades are obvious. Named schools do not guarantee admission. Living near a school is helpful, not decisive. Catchment boundaries are redrawn, oversubscription rules favour siblings and faith criteria over distance in many cases, and the school you can see from your kitchen window may not be the school your child gets allocated. Anyone buying with a specific school in mind needs to phone the admissions team in the relevant year, not the year before, and check the cut-off distance for the most recent intake. The honest answer to "is this house in the catchment" is to phone the school, then the council, then the school again.
The primary spread is wide and geographically distributed across the town. Gildredge House operates across both primary and secondary phases. The Cavendish School also runs across phases. The Catholic option is St Thomas A Becket Catholic Primary School. The Meads area has St John's Meads Church of England Primary School. The eastern side carries Heron Park Primary Academy, Langney Primary Academy, Shinewater Primary School, and The Haven Church of England Methodist Primary School. The older central streets have Motcombe Infants' School, Pashley Down Infant School, Ocklynge Junior School, St Andrew's Church of England Infants School, Bourne Primary School, Roselands Infants' School, Stafford Junior School, and the Parkland Infant and Junior schools. The western edge has Willingdon Primary School and Oakwood Primary Academy. Specialist provision includes The South Downs School, The Lindfield School, Hazel Court School, and Summerdown School. East Sussex College Group runs further education from school-leaving age upwards.
The independent picture is what's left of an extraordinary nineteenth-century boom. The town once carried a great many private schools serving the seaside boarding economy. Most closed between the wars; the rest scattered inland in 1940 when invasion looked likely and never fully returned. Eastbourne College, Bede's Prep School, and St Andrew's Prep are the survivors. The town does not try to recreate that era, which is sensible, and it doesn't pretend the survivors are the same Victorian institution they once were, which is honest.
Eastbourne's schools score three out of five, which is what you get when the dataset can't tell you which ones are good and the default has to do the work. The choice is wide. The legwork is yours.