Good, in the way rural primary schools usually are: small, and nowhere near as many of them as you would like. Tintagel Primary School is the village school, and it is the only school in the village. Cornwall as a whole inspects well. Secondary means a journey, every day, in both directions. The schools here are a strong point wearing a long commute.
Across Cornwall, Ofsted has graded 120 settings, and 95 of those sit at good or better, which is close to four in five. Three are outstanding and 20 require improvement, with five judged inadequate. A further 113 settings hold no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected under the current arrangements rather than anything about their quality. The headline is a county that mostly gets it right and occasionally does not, which is more useful to a buyer than any single school's last inspection letter.
Those are authority-wide numbers, not Tintagel's own. The village is too small for its own statistical picture, and the honest version of that sentence is that one school does not make a trend.
Tintagel Primary School carries the village name and takes the village children. Beyond that, the options run outward. There is no secondary school in the parish, so secondary-age children travel, and the modelled journey times reflect it: around 19 minutes by car to a secondary school, or roughly 35 minutes by public transport. Primary is a different matter entirely at about 8 minutes by car and 14 on foot. That gap between the two is the single most consequential fact about schooling here, and it lands the year your eldest turns eleven.
A word on catchments. Living in the village does not entitle anyone to a place at any particular school, and admission is decided by the authority's rules rather than by the postcode on your council tax bill. Distance from the school gates does most of the work in a rural authority, which cuts in Tintagel's favour for the village primary and against it for anything further afield. Anyone buying on the strength of a specific school should check the current admissions position for the actual year of entry rather than the position that applied when the estate agent last updated the listing.
The wider picture is a network of small village and town primaries feeding a much smaller number of secondaries, which is how most of rural Cornwall works. It produces schools where the head knows every child's name and where a single cohort can shift a year group's character. It also produces a school run measured in miles rather than minutes.
Schools are among the stronger reasons to live here. The inspection record across the county is solidly good, the village primary is on the doorstep, and the only real cost is the mileage you inherit when the children get older.