The schools are good, and for a town people still talk about in the past tense that comes as a surprise to outsiders. Close to four in five graded settings across the county come out good or better. Three carry the top grade. There are two secondaries in genuine reach rather than one and a long bus ride, and a ring of primaries close enough to walk to. Education is one of the least troubled things about this area.
Ofsted has published an overall grade for 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of those are good or outstanding, which is close to four in five. Three hold outstanding, 20 require improvement and 5 are rated inadequate. Those counts cover the whole local authority rather than Redruth alone, so they describe the system a family here is buying into rather than any particular school gate. A further 113 settings carry no published grade at all, usually because they have converted recently or have not yet been inspected. Ungraded is not a quiet way of saying bad, it means unmeasured, and treating it as a verdict is how people talk themselves out of perfectly decent schools.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that living near a school is not the same as getting into it. Cornwall Council runs admissions, oversubscription is decided by its criteria rather than by how close your front door feels, and no estate agent has ever been penalised for implying otherwise. Check the current admissions arrangements for the specific school before the postcode does any deciding for you.
Redruth School is the secondary carrying the town's name, taking pupils from eleven to sixteen. Its sixth form stopped taking new students in 2016 and closed for good in 2020 after funding cuts, so anyone planning a route through to eighteen is planning a commute, not a walk. Pool Academy sits just along the road as the second option, which is more secondary choice than most Cornish towns can offer. At primary level the town splits the early years across Trewirgie Infants' School and Trewirgie Junior School, so a family gets two sets of gates and two sets of parents to learn instead of one. Curnow School covers special educational needs. The rest of the provision sits in the surrounding villages, a scattering of community primaries each doing the same job for a few hundred children apiece, which is what the geography here has always produced.
Distances are short, at least on paper. Department for Transport modelling from 2019 puts a primary school at about 10 minutes on foot or 7 by car, and a secondary at about 10 minutes by car, 20 by public transport or half an hour walking. Those car and walk figures age well. The public transport ones are from 2019 and services have not stood still since, so treat the bus timings as the softest number on the page.
Schools are one of this area's genuine strengths, and the case for moving here rests on them more than on anything else a buyer will be shown at a viewing.