Better than the town's reputation would have you expect, which is the story of most of Bideford. Four in five graded settings across the county come out good or better. The primaries are numerous and mostly solid. There is one main state secondary and one independent, and the choice between them is a budget decision rather than a quality one. Nobody moves to Bideford for the schools, and nobody has to move away because of them either.
Across Devon, Ofsted has graded 172 settings, of which 138 came out good or better. That is roughly four in five, with 3 rated outstanding, 31 requiring improvement and 3 judged inadequate. Those are county-wide counts rather than Bideford's own, so they describe the water the town swims in rather than the specific pool. A further 135 settings hold no published overall grade yet, which means exactly that and nothing more: not inspected, not judged, not a warning sign.
The usual caveat applies harder here than the brochures admit. Living within sight of a school gate is not the same as having a place at it. Devon allocates on its own admissions rules, oversubscription happens, and the offer letter in the spring is where families discover whether the estate agent's confident sentence about the catchment was a fact or a sales technique. Check the current admissions criteria for the specific school before you let it move your budget.
Bideford College is the main state-funded secondary serving the town, which makes it the default answer for most families and the school whose reputation the town argues about in car parks. Kingsley School is the independent alternative, formed in 2009 from the merger of two older local independents, and it is the only one where the answer to "what are the schools like" involves a fee schedule. At primary level, East-the-Water Community Primary School sits across the river in the half of Bideford that behaves like a separate town, and St Mary's Church of England Primary School and West Croft School cover the western side. Beyond those, the wider area carries a spread of village primaries at Appledore, Instow, Parkham, Woolsery, Monkleigh, Hartland and Buckland Brewer, which is the north Devon pattern: a lot of small schools serving a lot of small places, most of them a drive rather than a walk.
Schools are one of the stronger cards Bideford holds. The county's graded settings come out well, the town has a proper secondary rather than a bus ride to one, and the only real work a buyer has to do is confirming the admissions arithmetic rather than the quality.