Good, as long as someone does the driving. The village has its own primary school. Secondary school means a trip out of the village. Across the county, more than eight in ten graded schools are good or better. The schools are strong. The hard part is getting to them.
Ofsted has graded 122 schools across West Sussex, and 103 of them are rated good or outstanding. That's more than eight in ten, which is a strong record for a whole county. Eleven hold outstanding, 17 are rated requires improvement and two inadequate. These figures cover the whole local authority, not Rudgwick on its own, so they describe the system you're buying into rather than the school at the end of the road. Another 125 settings hold no published grade yet and aren't counted either way.
Rudgwick Primary School sits in the village itself, which is the most useful fact on this page for a family with young children. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which date from 2019, put the nearest primary about 8 minutes away by car, 14 by public transport or 22 on foot. Primary school is the part of village life that works on foot.
Secondary school is where the mileage starts. The same 2019 figures put the nearest secondary about 18 minutes by car, 33 by public transport, and around an hour and a half on foot, which nobody is doing twice a day. Secondary schools named for the wider area include Tanbridge House School, Bohunt Horsham and The College of Richard Collyer in Horsham. That turns the teenage years into a timetable of lifts, and parents here learn the school run the way other people learn a second language.
The village also has two independent schools. Pennthorpe School is on Church Street, and Rikkyo School-in-England is a boarding school in the parish, with a grim bit of history in its grounds: during the Second World War two RAF bombers collided over Rudgwick, and the crash sites were excavated there in the 1990s. Neither school is part of the state allocation system, so for most families they're part of the scenery rather than the plan.
Buying near a school doesn't get your child a place there. Admissions follow the county's rules, which can change and don't bend for whatever the estate agent said about the catchment. Check the current admissions arrangements for any school you're counting on before you exchange contracts, not the week the offer letters arrive.
Schools are one of Rudgwick's real strengths. Just budget for the lifts as well as the house.