Heathfield's schools are good, and the town doesn't send its teenagers elsewhere for secondary school. About four in five graded schools across the county are good or better. The town has its own secondary. For most homes, a primary is a short walk away. What takes effort here is not finding a decent school. It is getting a place at the one you picked.
Ofsted has graded 67 schools and settings in the East Sussex local authority area, and 54 of them are good or outstanding, about four in five. Seven hold an outstanding grade and 47 are good. Seven more require improvement and six are rated inadequate. These counts cover the whole county authority, not just Heathfield, so they describe the system your child enters, not a promise about the school at the end of your road. Another 84 settings have no published grade yet, so they are not counted either way.
Proximity to a school does not guarantee a place there. Admissions follow the council's published rules, and those rules pay no attention to how many times you drove past the gates while house-hunting. Check the admissions criteria and last year's allocations for your exact address before you exchange contracts. Buyers who do this end up paying for a place they can realistically get. Buyers who skip it can find out on offer day that the school they were counting on had other plans.
For secondary school the local option is Heathfield Community College. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest secondary about 11 minutes away by car and about 33 minutes on foot, which is a walk most teenagers will describe as a hardship. The nearest primary is about 12 minutes' walk from the typical home. Among the primaries, Parkside Community Primary School serves the town itself, while Cross-in-Hand Church of England Primary School and Punnetts Town Community Primary and Nursery School serve the villages that ring it. All Saints' and St Richard's Church of England Primary School and Maynards Green Community Primary School round out the nearby choice. The spread gives parents real alternatives, which is either reassuring or the start of a spreadsheet, depending on the parent.
Schooling is one of Heathfield's real strengths. The county's grades are mostly good, and the town has a secondary of its own. The hard part is getting the admission you wanted, not finding a school worth wanting.