The schools are good, and dully consistent about it. Most graded settings across the county come out good or better. The town runs its own secondary rather than putting teenagers on a coach to somebody else's. The primaries are small, and most of them sit out in the surrounding parishes. This is not a place where the schools set the house prices, which is usually the sign that they are quietly getting on with the job.
Ofsted has published grades for 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them, roughly four in five, are rated good or better. Three carry an outstanding grade. Twenty require improvement and five are rated inadequate. Another 113 settings have no published grade at all, which is an absence of a verdict rather than a bad one, and treating that as a black mark is the kind of mistake that talks people out of perfectly decent schools. These counts cover the whole of Cornwall rather than Launceston on its own, so read them as the weather rather than the forecast for one street.
Which brings up the thing every buyer gets wrong. Living near a school is not the same as getting into it. Cornwall allocates places through its own admissions process, and the address that looks unbeatable on a map can still come back with a different school on the letter. Nobody at the council is being unfair about it. The process is simply indifferent to how much you liked the kitchen.
Launceston College is the secondary, and it is a school assembled from other schools, having absorbed two of them in the 1960s. In the town itself, Launceston Primary School and Windmill Hill Academy handle most of the primary-age intake, with St Stephens Community Academy carrying the name of the oldest settled corner of the town, the bit that existed before the castle turned up and stole the attention. St Joseph's School sits outside the state system for families who want that. Beyond those, the offer is a ring of small village primaries scattered through the parishes around the town, the sort where the entire school fits in one hall and the head teacher knows every parent's car.
Distance is worth a thought before you commit to anywhere rural. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 8 minutes away by car or 12 on foot, and the nearest secondary about 11 minutes by car and 37 on foot. That second number is the one that matters, because a 37-minute walk in February is not a plan, it is a negotiation you will be having every single morning for five years.
Schools are one of the strongest things this town has, and it manages it without a single listing needing to lean on the word catchment.