Good, and easiest while the children are under eleven. Four in five graded schools across the county are good or better. The village primary is a short walk from most front doors. Secondary school means a car or a long bus ride. In Mayfield the schools are fine, and the parents end up driving the school run for years.
Ofsted has graded 67 schools and settings across East Sussex, and 54 of them are rated good or outstanding, roughly four in every five. Seven are outstanding. At the other end, seven require improvement and six are inadequate, so the county has a weak tail even if the middle is solid. A further 84 settings have no published grade yet and aren't counted either way. These figures cover the whole of East Sussex, not Mayfield alone, so they tell you the standard of the pool you are fishing in and not the grade of any particular school.
On the ground, the primary years are straightforward. Mayfield Church of England Primary School carries the village's name, and Five Ashes Church of England Primary School serves the southern half of the parish. On the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling, the average home is about 12 minutes' walk from its nearest primary. That is close enough for the walk to school to stay a walk, which in the High Weald is not something to take for granted.
Secondary school is a different trip. The same modelling puts the nearest secondary about 19 minutes away by car, 48 minutes by public transport, and more than an hour and a half on foot. With half a bus an hour at peak, most families will settle on the car. Teenagers here learn the bus timetable early or they learn to ask nicely for a lift.
The village also has independent-looking names on the map. Mayfield School occupies the Old Palace, a Grade I listed building, and Skippers Hill Manor Preparatory School sits on the edge of the parish. Both are part of the local picture, but a school's presence down the road tells you nothing about its fees, its intake or whether it has a place for your child. Ask them directly.
None of these schools guarantees a place because you bought nearby. East Sussex allocates places under its own admissions rules, and living in Mayfield, even next door to a school, does not secure admission. Check the latest admissions criteria and each school's current Ofsted report before an offer on a house depends on it. Buyers who assume the school at the end of the lane is theirs by right sometimes find out in spring that it wasn't.
Schools are one of Mayfield's real strengths: a walkable village primary, a county where most graded schools make the grade, and the only real cost is the driving once secondary starts.