The schools are quietly the best argument for living here. Roughly four in five graded settings across the county are rated good or better. A handful are outstanding. Looe has both its own primary and its own secondary inside the town, so the eleven-year-old is not put on a coach in the dark. For a small coastal town at the end of a branch line, that is a better hand than the geography suggests.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them are good or better. Three carry an outstanding grade, 20 require improvement, and 5 are rated inadequate. Those counts cover the whole local authority rather than Looe alone, which is the honest caveat: Cornwall is a large county with a lot of very small schools in it, and a county average is a weather report rather than a forecast for your street. A further 113 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they are new or because the inspection has not come round yet. Nobody should read an absent grade as a bad one.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that a school being near your house is not the same as a school having your child in it. Cornwall allocates places, admission rules apply, and popular schools fill. Buyers who read a school name on a listing and mentally enrol their child have skipped the step where the council does the deciding, and that step tends to make itself known in the spring rather than at the viewing.
Looe Primary Academy carries the town's name and sits in the town. Looe Community Academy is the secondary, which matters more than it sounds: the alternative in this part of Cornwall is a long drive down lanes that were not built for a school run. Modelled journey times from the Department for Transport put a primary at around 20 minutes on foot or 10 minutes in the car, and a secondary at roughly 13 minutes by car, 34 minutes on public transport, or the better part of three quarters of an hour walking. Those figures date from 2019, and the car and walking times have aged better than the bus ones.
Beyond the town, the primaries thin out into the villages. Pelynt Primary Academy and Polperro Primary Academy serve the surrounding parishes, with a church primary further inland. They are small, they are rural, and their catchments are drawn across lanes rather than streets, which means the practical question is less about league tables and more about whether you fancy that drive twice a day for the next seven years in January weather. Ask the school, not the brochure.
Two things follow from all of this. A family moving here for the schools is making a defensible decision rather than a romantic one, and a family moving here who assumed they would simply pick the best-rated option and drive to it will discover that rural Cornwall does not offer that many options to pick between.
Education is one of the genuine strengths of the place. A town this size holding both a primary and a secondary of its own, in a county where most of the graded settings come out good or better, is the kind of thing people only notice when they move somewhere that has neither.