Mullion has its own primary and its own secondary, which on the Lizard Peninsula counts as a fully equipped education system. Most children here can walk to both. The secondary takes in pupils from villages that lost their own schools years ago. Parents elsewhere in Cornwall spend a great deal of time in a car doing what Mullion families do on foot, which is the single most underrated thing about living here.
The inspection picture comes from Ofsted's register for Cornwall as a whole rather than this village alone, so read it as the county backdrop. Of the 120 settings in Cornwall carrying a published overall grade, 95 are rated good or better, which is roughly four in five. Three are rated outstanding, 20 require improvement, and five are rated inadequate. A further 113 settings hold no published grade yet, which means not inspected under the current framework rather than anything about their quality.
Mullion School is the secondary, and it is the local one in a way that matters: the Lizard does not offer an alternative within casual reach. Mullion Primary School sits in the village itself. The other primaries in the area are scattered across the peninsula at Coverack, Landewednack, St Keverne, Garras and Manaccan, each serving its own handful of lanes, and two nearby village primaries have closed in recent years. Rural primary provision here is not a menu. It is whatever has survived.
Distance is the part parents can actually plan around. Department for Transport modelling puts the nearest primary at about a ten-minute walk and the nearest secondary at about 14 minutes, with car journeys of roughly seven and eight minutes. Those are 2019 modelled times, and the walking figures age far better than the public transport ones, because pavements do not get withdrawn from service.
Being close to a school gate is not the same as having a place behind it. Cornwall Council allocates places, admissions run on published criteria rather than on the map in an estate agent's window, and a popular year group can fill before a distance that looked comfortable turns out not to be. Anyone buying specifically for a school should confirm current admission arrangements with the council and the school before committing, not afterwards. Nobody has ever won an appeal by producing a property listing.
For post-sixteen study, anything beyond what the local secondary offers means travelling off the peninsula, and the peninsula is a long thin thing with one road doing most of the work. That is a sixth-form conversation worth having when your child is 13 rather than 16.
Schooling is one of the real strengths here, and unusually for a village this remote it is a strength you can walk to. A primary in the village, a secondary a quarter of an hour on foot, and a county inspection record where the clear majority of graded settings are good or better is a better hand than most of coastal Cornwall is holding.