The schools here are good, and the village has its own primary, which in a settlement this size is not a given. Four in five graded schools across the county come out good or better. A few carry the top grade. The nearest secondary is a drive rather than a walk. Primary years are sorted; the teenage years come with a timetable and a set of car keys.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, and 138 of them, four in five, are rated good or outstanding. Three hold the outstanding grade, 31 require improvement, and three are rated inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published overall grade at all, because they have not been inspected under the current arrangements rather than because anything is wrong with them. Those are county-wide counts covering everything from village primaries to sixth forms, so they describe the pool Bere Alston sits in, not the school at the end of the lane.
Worth saying plainly, because it catches people out every year: a school appearing in a property listing is not the same as a place in that school. Admission is settled by the admissions authority on its own published rules, and those rules take no interest in how much you paid for the house or how strongly the agent implied it. Buy the house because you want the house. Check the allocation position separately, in writing, before anyone gets attached.
Bere Alston Primary Academy is the school that carries the village name and the one most local families will be walking to. The Department for Transport's modelling puts the nearest primary at roughly 7 minutes by car and about 10 minutes on foot, which is the whole point of a village primary and the reason people tolerate everything else about rural life. Beyond it, the surrounding options run to church primaries including Lady Modiford's Church of England Primary School and St Andrew's Church of England Academy, alongside Horrabridge Primary & Nursery School, plus a set of smaller independent and specialist settings scattered across the wider area. None of those individual schools has a grade attached in the figures used here, so treat the county picture as background and look up each school's own most recent inspection before deciding anything.
Secondary is where the geography starts charging rent. The same modelling puts the nearest secondary at about 23 minutes by car and roughly 32 minutes by public transport. Those figures were modelled in 2019, and the public transport half of that ages considerably faster than the car half, because bus routes get withdrawn and models do not notice. In practice, secondary here means a daily journey out of the valley, organised by someone, every morning, for five years. Families who move in for the primary and work out the secondary arrangements later tend to have one specific conversation in Year Five that they wish they had held before exchanging contracts.
On the whole, schooling is one of the stronger arguments for the village. The odds across the county are genuinely good, the primary is close enough to walk, and the only real cost is the distance to secondary and the driving it quietly commits you to.