Worthing schools run to numbers most towns would envy. Twenty-two primary schools. Six state secondaries. A sixth-form college, a further-education college, and two independents. Choice is not the problem. Catchment is.
Every school named below is a real Worthing school; none of it guarantees admission for a specific address. West Sussex County Council allocates on distance and sibling links, which means the family that bought a semi across the street from the school gate gets what the family two miles further away is competing for. Anyone buying a house because of a specific school should read the current admissions criteria from the county council rather than the estate agent's brochure, because the catchment map moves each year with the applications that come in.
The six state secondaries in the borough are Bohunt School Worthing in Broadwater, running coeducational as an academy; Durrington High School to the north-west; St Andrew's CofE High School, which opened its doors to girls from 2021 having previously run as a boys' school; Worthing High School; Davison Church of England High School for Girls in East Worthing, single-sex in an era when most schools around it have gone coeducational and stayed that way; and St Oscar Romero Catholic School in the Goring end of the borough. An independent option runs in the town centre in Our Lady of Sion School, which covers ages three to eighteen and takes the private-sector question off the table for families who want it.
Primary options cover the town's neighbourhoods thickly. Broadwater CofE Primary and Elm Grove Primary sit in and around the older parish core. A Church of England primary runs in Ferring on the western coastal edge, with another at Goring-by-Sea further along. Durrington Infant School and Durrington Junior School serve Durrington itself. Heene CofE Primary and the paired Thomas A Becket Infant and Thomas A Becket Junior schools cover the older residential grid. Whytemead Primary, Downsbrook Primary, Homefield Primary, Hawthorns Primary, and Springfield Infant and Nursery pick up the neighbourhoods between. The Catholic route runs through English Martyrs Catholic Primary and St Mary's Catholic Primary. Clapham and Patching CofE Primary serves the villages north of the A27, where the borough tips into the South Downs. West Park CofE Primary sits further out among the residential streets. There are twenty-two primary schools in the borough, so a family's choice is real; whether the chosen door is a walk from a specific street is a different question, and the different question is usually the harder one.
Independent, preparatory, and special-needs provision fills out the picture. Lancing College Preparatory School at Worthing operates as the prep school for the older Lancing College a few miles east, which is a real morning drive in either direction but doable if the school is the deciding factor. Courtlands Independent Special School, Palatine Primary School, and Oak Grove College cover parts of the special-needs picture. For post-sixteen, the borough runs a sixth-form college in the town and a separate further-education college, the latter with its main campus at West Durrington and its creative-arts courses validated by the University of the Arts London.
Rated average on the summary, three out of five. That reflects a picture where the choice is wide, the catchment is decisive, and the answer to whether a particular school suits a particular family is one that turns on the postcode you buy in, the criteria that apply in the year you apply, and a school-by-school inspection look-up that any buyer serious about the school question should run for themselves before signing anything.