On 10 December 1945 Mr Monaghan took over as headmaster of Garvald Primary School, and it was he who wrote the Garvald parish material for the Third Statistical Account. It was a two-teacher school with about 40 pupils. By this time all those over eleven years old were bussed to the Knox in Haddington. Monaghan only stayed five years. In the summer of 1950, Mr Anderson took over and stayed until 1968, by which time the roll had fallen to 20, and it had become a single teacher school. A feature of the logbook is the number of times heavy snowstorms made it impossible for children to reach the school from the surrounding farms. Normally hot dinners were brought to the school every day, but in the snow, emergency rations were available.
It was 1967 before the school had inside toilets. By 1970 the roll had fallen to eleven and the school finally closed on 31 March 1971. From then on, children were taken by bus to Yester and Haddington. In the last 20 years the number of children in the village increased, especially with the building of the houses at Castle Moffat water works and at Manse Brae.
Throughout the period children from some of the better-off homes went to private schools, as day pupils to Edinburgh, or as boarders further afield. In the 1990s some of the Edinburgh schools provided private buses and the parents only had to take their children to Haddington.
Many of the children in the parish did very well in their careers, which have included medicine, law, TV, agriculture, nursing, teaching and engineering.