Good, and unusually self-contained for a village. Braunton has its own secondary, so children are not shipped off somewhere else at eleven. The primaries sit inside a walk. The county's inspection record is solid rather than showy. For a place this far down the North Devon coast, that is a stronger hand than most villages are dealt.
Ofsted has published a grade for 172 settings across Devon, the local authority Braunton belongs to, and 138 of those, roughly eight in ten, come out good or better. Three are outstanding. Thirty-one require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than not up to much. Worth being clear that these are county-wide counts covering everything from village primaries to sixth forms, not a verdict on any one school gate in Braunton.
Three outstanding grades across a county the size of Devon says more about how sparingly the inspectorate hands the word out than it does about the classrooms. The useful signal is the eight in ten at good or better, because that is the band almost every school a Braunton family would realistically use is sitting in.
Braunton Academy is the secondary that carries the village name and takes the local intake. Caen Community Primary School is the primary inside the village itself. Georgeham Church of England Primary School, Kingsacre Primary School and Southmead School cover the surrounding lanes and the Barnstaple side, and between them they mop up most of the families who want something other than the default. The Department for Transport's modelling puts the nearest primary at about 14 minutes on foot or roughly 8 by car, and the nearest secondary at about 20 minutes walking or about 8 driving, which is the sort of arrangement that makes the second family car an argument rather than a necessity.
None of that guarantees a place. A school being visible from the bedroom window carries no legal weight whatsoever. Admission is settled by the local authority's own process in the year you apply, against however many other families applied that year, and the answer arrives long after the mortgage has been signed. Anyone buying with a specific school in mind should put the exact address to the county before the offer, not after.
Schools are one of Braunton's real strengths, and the rare part of the case for living here that does not come with a caveat about the bus timetable or the flood map.