Good, and the catch is geography rather than quality. The village has one primary, and it is a small one. The nearest secondary sits on the far bank of the river. Across Cornwall, close to four in five graded schools come out good or better. The grades are not the thing that will keep you up at night here. The school run is.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them are good or better, which is close to four in five. Three carry an outstanding grade, 20 require improvement and five are rated inadequate. Those counts cover the whole local authority, not this village, which for a place this size is the only honest way to read them: one primary is a sample of one, and a county is a sample worth something. A further 113 settings hold no published overall grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than quietly failing, and anyone treating an absent grade as a bad one is inventing information.
Being near a school is not the same as getting into it. Cornwall allocates places through its own admissions process, and proximity is one factor among several rather than a guarantee, so a house within sight of the school gates buys you a view and nothing more binding than that. Anyone buying for a specific school should check the current admissions arrangements for the year they need, not the year the estate agent last looked.
Polruan Primary Academy is the village school, mixed and non-denominational, and it is genuinely small. That cuts both ways, and the honest version is that a small school gives a quiet child a lot of attention and gives a child who does not click with their year group very few alternatives. Department for Transport modelling puts a primary at roughly eight minutes by car, about 22 minutes on foot and around 20 minutes by public transport, which in practice means most families here walk it, uphill, in whatever the Channel is doing that morning. Fowey Primary School sits across the water as the other realistic option.
Secondary is where the water starts charging rent. Fowey River Academy is the nearest, and the modelled journey runs about 28 minutes by car or roughly 77 minutes on public transport. The passenger ferry crosses to Fowey every day of the year, which makes the crossing itself reliable, but a teenager who misses it is not catching the next one from a bus stop around the corner. Six bus stops serve the village, averaging about 16 scheduled weekday departures between them, and none of them run at the weekend. Parents of teenagers with weekend fixtures should price in the driving before they price in the view.
The rest of the county's provision sits at a distance that is fine for a determined household and tiring for everyone else, and there is no independent or specialist alternative inside the village to fall back on.
Schools are among the strongest things Polruan has going for it, with a county record that is genuinely good and a village primary sitting at the top of the hill. The qualification is not the teaching. It is that every stage after primary involves crossing a river.