Seaford has one state secondary school. It has four state primaries. Two specialist schools sit alongside them for pupils who need something different. None of them come with currently published grades to point at, so the school question for anyone moving here is answered mostly by talking to parents and visiting. Choose your primary. Assume the secondary.
The four state primaries are Chyngton School, Cradle Hill Community Primary School, Annecy Catholic Primary School, and Seaford Primary School. That is enough coverage for a town of roughly 24,000 people, spread widely enough that most postcodes are within reasonable walking distance of at least one. Annecy is the Catholic option, which shapes its admissions accordingly. The other three cover the general state intake. None come with a current inspection grade to lean on, which puts the parental grapevine in charge of what most towns rely on inspection reports to settle.
Seaford Head School is the only state secondary in the town itself. It serves the majority of families who do not travel out for private education or a place elsewhere in East Sussex. Its sixth form closed in 2009 and reopened in 2014, which is the kind of history that reads as turbulent or resilient depending on which pupil intake you catch. Families who want alternatives at secondary look toward Lewes or Eastbourne, and a few travel further afield. Some make the trip by train from Seaford Rail Station or Bishopstone Rail Station. It is the sort of school landscape where visiting before committing is the honest local advice.
Two specialist schools sit alongside the mainstream provision. Bowden House School is a special-needs boarding school run by Tower Hamlets Council in London, which is a distinctive arrangement, and reflects the fact that Seaford has historically been where London boroughs sent children who needed a break from London. Cuckmere House School provides further specialist places. Neither is an option for the general state intake, but both are part of what the local school picture actually is.
Naming a primary school here does not guarantee your child gets into it. East Sussex admissions run on distance-based oversubscription criteria, which means everyone within the notional catchment gets ranked each year by proximity. If you buy a house four hundred metres from your first choice and someone else buys one three hundred and fifty metres away in the same admissions year, you go on the reserve list and hope. The catchment behaves less like a boundary and more like a rank order that shifts each year based on everyone else's rank order.
The town was once known nationally as a school town. There was a road sign on Sutton Avenue in the 1960s warning drivers of seven schools coming up in the next mile. Micklefield, the last of the girls' preparatory schools that made Seaford famous, closed in 1994. Almost all of the old sites are now streets of houses. What is left is public, modest, and does not come with current published grades. Some parents like the quiet. Some do not.
The state schools here are middling by inheritance and by design. If school choice is the thing you are most solving for, this is a town that will make you either commute for it or pay for it privately.