Steyning has four schools, and one of them was founded before the English Civil War. Three primaries sit in and around the town. One secondary covers the district. Only about one in seven households here is a couple with children, and the median resident is fifty-four. Not a school-run town, and not one that pretends to be.
The primary options are Steyning Church of England Primary School in the town itself, Upper Beeding Primary School in the village next door, and Ashurst Church of England Primary School about two miles west. Each sits in a different village or edge of town, which means each has its own catchment, which means the assumption that living in Steyning gets your child into any of them is exactly the assumption that produces the offer-letter surprise in March. The secondary is Steyning Grammar School, founded in 1614 by William Holland, alderman of Chichester. Older than the Enlightenment, older than the Union, older than the railway that came to Steyning in 1861 and gave up on it in 1966.
West Sussex allocates places on the standard distance-and-sibling arithmetic. Living near a school is not the same as being in its catchment in any given year, and catchments quietly move as application volumes and sibling counts shift. Buying a house because you assumed a specific school would follow is the decision that deserves a phone call to the admissions office before the phone call to the estate agent. The town is small, the schools have real geography, and the geography does the deciding. The primaries at Ashurst and Upper Beeding sit in separate villages with separate catchments, which is West Sussex parish structure rather than a marketing feature and not something the paperwork bends around for anyone.
The primaries are what small-town and village primaries look like: modestly sized, walkable from the streets they serve, and not competing for reputation the way urban primaries do. Steyning Grammar School does the secondary years for the wider Adur-valley district, which means its intake reaches well beyond the town boundary into surrounding villages that also send their children up the road in the morning. The name causes reliable confusion for families expecting an eleven-plus, which is the kind of confusion you'd want to resolve before the offer round rather than during it.
The demographic picture matters here more than the individual school does. Around fifteen percent of Steyning households are couples with children. Another seven or eight percent are lone-parent households. The remaining three-quarters is retirees, single-person households, and couples past the school-run years. This means the school system is calibrated to a smaller share of the population than in a new-build suburb where three-quarters of households have a school-age child under the roof. If you're moving here for the schools alone, you're moving to a town where most of your neighbours are not thinking about them at all. That's neither good nor bad. It's the size of the school-shaped hole in the town's average day.
Three out of five on schools, which is what an average small-town school picture looks like without the marketing on top. Steyning has schools. Whether they're the right schools for your child is a conversation with the school itself, not with the town's estate agents.