Good, in the boring way that matters. The village has its own primary. Nearly every graded school in the county is rated good or better. A handful are outstanding. The catch is not quality, it is geography: the good options are spread across a lot of Cornish lanes, and most of them involve a car.
Ofsted has published overall effectiveness grades for 120 settings across Cornwall, the local authority Lanivet sits in, and 95 of them are good or better. That is roughly four in five. Three are outstanding, 20 require improvement and 5 are inadequate. A further 113 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they have not been inspected or because the inspection framework does not grade them, and those should not be read as anything either way. These counts cover the whole county rather than the schools a Lanivet family would realistically use, so treat them as the background against which the local options sit, not as a verdict on any particular school gate.
The important caveat before anyone starts drawing circles on a map: being near a school is not the same as getting into it. Cornwall Council runs admissions, oversubscribed schools apply their published criteria, and distance is one factor among several rather than a guarantee. Anyone buying a house on the strength of a specific school should check that school's own admissions arrangements and its most recent allocation round before the offer goes in, not after the offer letter arrives in the spring.
Lanivet Community Primary School is the one in the village, and for most families here it is the default rather than a choice. Beyond it, the primary options fan out across the surrounding parishes. Nanstallon Community Primary School is the closest of the neighbours, over toward the Camel valley. Cardinham School and Luxulyan School sit on either side of the village in the other direction, and Lanlivery Primary Academy covers the ground toward the south. Further out, the register runs to a dozen or so village primaries with saints' names attached to most of them, which is Cornwall doing what Cornwall does. Bosvena School and Red Moor School serve pupils with additional needs and are worth knowing about for families who need them.
What the village does not have is a secondary school, and there is no way to dress that up. Secondary means Bodmin, and it means transport. The Department for Transport's modelling puts a secondary school at about 15 minutes by car from Lanivet, 32 minutes by public transport and 70 minutes on foot. The car figure is the honest one. The public transport figure is from 2019 modelling and rural bus services have not generally improved since, so a family relying on the bus should verify the actual timetable rather than the model. A primary school comes out at about 9 minutes by car and 21 minutes walking, which for the village school itself is an overstatement, since it is in the village.
Two independent schools in the wider area that families might remember from an older list have since closed. Anyone working from a list of a few years ago should update it before drawing up a shortlist.
Schools are among the better reasons to be here. The county's inspection record is strong, the village has its own primary, and the only real cost is the driving that secondary age brings, which in rural Cornwall is a cost you were always going to pay.