The schools are one of the easier parts of moving here. The town has its own secondary, so nobody is shipped across a county to sit an exam. It has a spread of primaries, including ones in the villages around the water. It also has a university, which is not standard issue for a town this size. Falmouth is a place where education is a walkable problem rather than a logistical one.
Ofsted has published a grade for 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them come out good or outstanding, which is close to four in five. Three of those carry an outstanding grade. Twenty require improvement and five are rated inadequate, so the county is not uniformly comfortable, and the variation matters more than the headline when you are choosing between two schools a mile apart. A further 113 settings hold no published grade at all yet, which means unrated rather than unloved. These counts cover the whole of Cornwall rather than Falmouth alone, so treat them as the weather rather than the forecast for your specific street.
The thing that catches buyers out is admission. Living near a school you like is not the same as getting into it, and none of the grades above travel with the house deeds. Cornwall allocates places on its own published criteria, oversubscribed schools fill up on distance and siblings, and a strong local reputation is precisely what creates the queue. Check the current year's admission arrangements for the specific school before you fall in love with a specific kitchen.
Falmouth School is the town's secondary, and it is the default answer for most of the families on this page. For primaries, Falmouth Primary Academy and Marlborough School sit in the town itself, with King Charles Church of England Primary School sharing its name with the seventeenth-century church the Killigrews gave the land for, which is the sort of continuity that only happens in towns that have been towns for four hundred years. Out in the villages, Mylor Bridge Community Primary School serves the creek-head settlements north of the town, and Flushing School sits across the water, in a village with its own ferry, which makes for the most civilised school run in Cornwall on the four days a year the weather allows it. Beyond those, the wider area carries several more primaries covering the inland villages, including church and Catholic schools, so there is genuine choice without a long drive.
Then there is Falmouth University, which has a campus at the original Woodlane site in the town and another at Tremough in Penryn, shared with the University of Exeter. For a family, the practical consequence is a town where a sixteen-year-old can see a plausible next step without leaving the postcode, which is rarer in rural England than anyone admits.
Schooling is the strongest card this town holds. A secondary in the town, primaries spread across the town and its villages, and a county record where the clear majority of graded settings land good or better, all of it reachable without a forty-minute drive at eight in the morning.