The schools here are good, and the choice narrows sharply as the children get older. Ten state primaries serve the area, most of them small. There are two secondaries, and one of those sits in another town along the coast. Grades across the county run good or better for close to four in five settings. The primary years hand you options; the secondary years hand you a decision.
There are 10 mainstream state primaries in the area, which is a generous number for a town this size, and the reason is geography rather than ambition: the surrounding villages have kept their own schools going, including the Church of England primary at Symondsbury. Across those 10, the Key Stage 2 maths average score is about 102. In the town itself the obvious starting points are Bridport Primary School and St Catherine's Roman Catholic School, with the rest spread out among the lanes in the sort of building where the head teacher also knows your dog.
Secondary is where the shortlist collapses. Two mainstream state secondaries serve the area, The Sir John Colfox Academy on the edge of town and The Woodroffe School over at Lyme Regis, and between them the pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score is about 48. The sixth form at Colfox is run jointly with a school in the next town, which tells you plenty about the pupil numbers out here. On Department for Transport modelled journey times from 2019, a secondary is roughly 12 minutes away by car and about 40 minutes on foot, which answers the question of whether your fourteen-year-old walks.
Ofsted's published grades cover the whole of Dorset rather than Bridport alone, so treat them as county weather rather than a local forecast. Of the 86 settings carrying a published overall grade, 68 are good or better, which is close to four in five. Two are outstanding, 17 require improvement and 1 is inadequate. A further 52 settings hold no published grade at all, which means only that they have not been graded.
None of that guarantees a place. Naming a school is not the same as getting into one, and admission runs on each school's own published arrangements rather than on whatever impression was left by the person showing you round the house. Read the arrangements for the exact address, in the year you actually need them, and read them before you offer rather than after.
Schools are one of the real strengths of living here, and the reason is unglamorous: steady results, and a scatter of small primaries that have survived when plenty elsewhere did not. The weakness is not quality. It is that when your child turns eleven, the list has two names on it.