Good, and undramatically so. Roughly four in five graded settings across the county come out good or better. The village has a primary school with its own name on the gate. The secondaries are in the next towns along the road. Schools are the part of moving here that generates the least argument, which is not something most places can say.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, the local authority Illogan sits inside, and 95 of them are good or better, which is about four in five. Three hold outstanding. Twenty are rated requires improvement and five inadequate, so the county is not uniform and the spread is real. A further 113 settings carry no published overall grade at all, which means not yet inspected under current arrangements rather than anything about their quality. All of these are county-wide counts covering Cornwall from Bude to Penzance, not a scorecard for one village.
Living near a school is not the same as getting into it. Cornwall Council allocates places on its own admissions rules, and oversubscription is decided by criteria that have nothing to do with which house a buyer likes best. Anyone buying for a particular school should put the exact address through the council's admissions checker before the offer goes in, not after the offer letter arrives in the spring. Estate agents describe a school as nearby. The admissions office describes it as full.
Illogan School is the one that carries the village name and does the everyday work of getting local children to eleven. Portreath Community Primary School sits within reach for families on the coastal side, and there are several other primaries in the surrounding villages and in Redruth. Department for Transport modelling from 2019 puts a primary school at roughly 13 minutes on foot from a typical Illogan postcode, which is the kind of number that decides whether a family owns one car or two.
Secondary means leaving the village. Pool Academy and Redruth School are the two options, and the same modelling puts a secondary at about 9 minutes by car, 16 by public transport, or 27 on foot. That walk is possible in June and a different proposition in February. Curnow School provides specialist education in the area for children with additional needs, and there is alternative provision locally as well, so the range is wider than a village of this size would normally support.
What the numbers do not capture is that the choice here is genuinely a choice. Two secondaries within a short drive, several primaries in reach, and a county record where the good grades substantially outnumber the poor ones. That is not universal in rural Cornwall, where plenty of villages have one primary and a bus to somewhere.
Schools are one of Illogan's real strengths, and the strongest thing a family buying here gets for the money. The caution is not the quality, which is well above the point where anyone needs to worry. It is the admissions arithmetic, which will decide the outcome long before the Ofsted grade does.