Good, and unusually so for a town this size. There is a primary carrying the town's name and a secondary that people in bigger places would move for. Both are within a short walk of most of the town. The wider county picture is solid rather than spectacular. A parent moving here is buying the rare thing where the local school is simply the school, no algorithm required.
The primary picture runs across three mainstream state primaries in the area. Beaminster St Mary's Academy sits in the town itself, with Broadwindsor Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School and Parrett and Axe Church of England Voluntary Aided Primary School covering the surrounding parishes. Between them, key stage two maths averages about 102, which is a little above the expected standard and steady rather than showy. The Department for Transport's modelling puts a primary school around 14 minutes on foot, or eight in the car for anyone who has met a Dorset school run in February.
Secondary is a single school in the area. Beaminster School takes the town and the villages around it, and its attainment eight score comes in at around 47. Mountjoy School shares the same site, which means the town runs its mainstream secondary and its specialist provision from one campus rather than sending anyone twenty miles for the latter. The walk to secondary is modelled at around 17 minutes, which is the sort of arrangement most parents elsewhere would consider a fantasy.
Across the whole Dorset local authority rather than just this corner of it, Ofsted has published a grade for 86 settings. Sixty-eight of those are good or better, so roughly four in five, with two rated outstanding, 17 requiring improvement and one inadequate. A further 52 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they are new or because they have not yet been inspected under the current arrangements, and those are neither good nor bad news until somebody visits.
The usual caution applies: naming a school is not the same as securing a place at it. Admissions here run on the county's rules rather than on which house you liked the look of, oversubscription happens in small towns as readily as large ones, and the honest move is to check the current arrangements with Dorset before you fall for a kitchen. Nothing about a short walk on a map guarantees the offer letter in March.
Beaminster's schools are one of the strongest things about living here, and the fact that the primary, the secondary and the specialist school are all effectively in the town is the part that money cannot usually buy.