The schools are good, and most of them belong to somebody else's village. Roughly four in five graded settings across the county are good or better. The primaries serving this area are small and spread across neighbouring parishes. Secondary school means a car journey. Good schooling is available here; convenient schooling is a different question.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, the local authority this area sits within, and 138 of them are good or better, which is about four in five. Three hold an outstanding grade. Thirty-one require improvement and three are rated inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published overall grade at all, having not been inspected under that framework, and they sit in neither column rather than quietly in the bad one. All of this is county-wide. Devon is an enormous authority stretching well beyond these lanes, so the average tells you the general standard of the machine and nothing whatsoever about the classroom your child would actually be in.
Naming a school is not the same as being offered a place at it. Admissions are decided by the council against its own published criteria, and living within sight of a school gate has never been a guarantee anywhere. Out here the distances between villages do the rest of the work, so the sensible order is to check the current admissions arrangements for the specific school first, then the house, rather than buying on the assumption and finding out in the spring.
The primaries in this area take their names from the villages around it rather than from Beaworthy. Halwill Community Primary School and Highampton Community Primary School sit to the east and north. Ashwater Primary School and Black Torrington Church of England Primary School cover the western and northern parishes. Shebbear Community School serves its own village, where Shebbear College is also based, giving that one settlement two schools while several larger-sounding places have none. These are small rural schools, which is the trade being offered: small year groups, a short list of options, and the same set of faces from reception onwards.
The journey times are where the honest cost shows up. Department for Transport modelling puts the nearest primary at about nine minutes by car and about 22 minutes on foot, which is workable. The nearest secondary is about 22 minutes by car and about 64 minutes by public transport. Those figures date from 2019, and while the driving times hold up reasonably well, the public transport ones age every time a rural service is cut, so treat the bus number as the optimistic version. In practice, secondary education here is a driving commitment for somebody in the household, every morning, in weather that does not care about your work calendar.
Schooling is one of the genuine strengths of living out here, provided the strength you want is quality rather than choice. The grades hold up, the primaries are close enough to walk to in some parishes, and the price of all of it is paid in mileage once the children hit eleven.