The schools are one of the better reasons to be here, with a rural asterisk attached. Four in five graded schools across the county come out good or better. Two primaries serve the town and the village a mile north of it. The nearest secondary is a drive rather than a walk. Decent schooling is genuinely available; the school run is what you pay for it.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, the local authority covering this area, and 138 of them hold a grade of good or outstanding, which is roughly four in five. Three are rated outstanding, 31 require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which is a gap in the record rather than a judgement on them. Those counts describe a very large county with a great many small schools, so treat the figure as the county's weather rather than a forecast for one particular playground.
The usual warning applies with more force here than in a city. Living near a school named on a listing does not get a child into it, because places are allocated by the local authority against its own admission rules, and proximity is an input rather than a guarantee. Estate agents mention the good primary the way they mention the view: something visible from the property, not something included with it.
Buckfastleigh Primary School is the one carrying the town's name, on a site the town has been schooling children on since a new primary was built here in 1875. St Mary's Catholic Primary School sits at Buckfast, the settlement immediately north. Between them they are the walkable option, and the walk is real: Department for Transport modelling puts the nearest primary at about eight minutes by car or 22 on foot.
Secondary is where the geography starts charging rent. There is no secondary school in the town, and the nearest one is modelled at about 14 minutes by car, 44 minutes by public transport, or 84 minutes on foot. That modelling dates from 2019 and the driving figure has aged better than the bus figure, so the honest planning assumption is a car twice a day for seven years, or a teenager who becomes very familiar with a timetable. Everything beyond that, the sixth form options and the specialist provision, is spread across the wider county on the same terms.
Schooling is among the strongest cards this place holds, provided the household has a driver and the patience to use one.