Good, and getting in is the harder part. More than four in five local schools are rated Good or better. The infant and junior schools carry the village's name. The secondaries mean a drive or a bus. Parents here spend more energy on the admissions form than on the league tables, and they're right to.
Ofsted has graded 122 schools and settings across West Sussex, and 103 of them are rated Good or Outstanding, which is more than four in five. Eleven hold Outstanding, 17 Require Improvement and two are rated Inadequate. These are county-wide counts, not a tally of Southwater's own schools, so they describe the wider pool rather than the gate at the end of your road. Settings with no published grade yet are left out entirely. They haven't failed anything; nobody has inspected them yet.
Southwater Infant Academy and Southwater Junior Academy are the village's own primary schools, and the ones most local parents plan around. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 14 minutes' walk from the typical home, close enough that the school run can be done on foot. That's rarer than estate agents' photographs of happy children on scooters would suggest.
Secondary school is where the car keys come out. The same modelling puts the nearest secondary about 15 minutes away by car, around 29 minutes by public transport and over an hour on foot. Millais School and The Forest School are the secondaries named nearby, which puts Southwater teenagers on the road to Horsham for the next five years of their lives. Christ's Hospital, the independent school in the same corner of the district, is an odd neighbour for a working village: Southwater's brickworks supplied bricks for its buildings, and now families pay to send their children through the gates their great-grandparents helped build.
Being close to a named school doesn't get your child a place there. West Sussex allocates places through its own admissions rules, and those rules don't care that your house is nearer than the next family's or that the listing called it "within catchment". Check the council's current admissions criteria and last year's allocations before you offer, not after. A family who moves in March expecting a place in September can learn a lot about bureaucracy in a very short time.
The wider villages of Barns Green and Coolham, covered by this page, have their own small primaries nearby, Barns Green Primary School among them, so the Southwater schools aren't the only option for families living on the rural fringe.
Schools are one of Southwater's real strengths. The quality is there, and the only thing standing between a family and it is the admissions process.