Two primaries inside the town and one secondary covering the peninsula. That is the Selsey school picture in one sentence, with a wider primary catchment drawn from the rest of the Manhood Peninsula. The available Ofsted picture in the published data is thin enough that buyers cannot sort the choice by rating in the way they would in a denser part of the South East. The decision is mostly geographic. Closest school wins, because the alternative means a drive that nobody who chose Selsey for the bungalows is keen on.
Inside Selsey itself, the two named state primaries are Seal Primary Academy and Medmerry Primary School. The secondary is The Academy at Selsey, which has carried that name since the school converted in 2011. There is one independent option close enough to figure in the local decision: Westbourne House School, the prep-school route for families who can write the cheque and prefer a country-house setting to the local-state structure.
The wider primary catchment, for families further out on the peninsula or further inland, includes East Wittering Community Primary School, West Wittering Parochial Church of England School, Sidlesham Primary School, Birdham Church of England Primary School, Aldingbourne Primary School, North Mundham Primary School, Eastergate Church of England Primary School and Tangmere Primary Academy. Each runs its own admissions logic and its own waiting list. None is inside Selsey, and most are a meaningful drive from a Selsey address, which is the kind of detail that does not occur to the parent who fell in love with the view until the September of the year the school place was actually needed. For secondary, the realistic alternatives are Ormiston Six Villages Academy further east toward Aldingbourne, and Chichester Free School, which runs primary and secondary phases on the same site.
None of those names is a guarantee. Being on a Selsey postcode does not promise a place at any particular school, and being on the wrong side of an arbitrary line does not lock anyone out either. Admissions each year depend on places offered, places refused, sibling priority, and the actual home-to-school distance, not on what the buyer thought the catchment was when they put in the offer. The single source of truth is each school's own admissions page for the year the child is entering, not the postcode of the house being bought.
The practical effect is simple. A buyer who needs the school decision settled before exchanging contracts should ring the school directly, ask about the current intake, the over-subscription history, and the actual catchment radius from the preferred address. The school will know. The admissions team is also generally willing to talk, because sorting a confusion in May is easier on everyone than sorting it on the first day of September.
Schools in Selsey land at three out of five on an honest read, and they land there because there is not enough graded data in the public picture to push them higher or lower. They are a fact of life on the peninsula. Not a draw, not a deal-breaker, just there.