Good, and boringly so, which is the outcome most parents actually want. Nearly four in five graded settings across the county come out good or better. One secondary school covers the town. The primaries are small, spread across surrounding villages, and mostly unremarkable in the way that means nothing is going wrong. Bude is not a place where you buy a house to game an admissions map.
Ofsted has graded 120 settings across Cornwall, and 95 of them are good or better, which is close to four in five. Three hold outstanding. Twenty require improvement and five are rated inadequate. Those are county-wide counts covering every graded setting from Bude to the Tamar, not a Bude-only scorecard, so they tell you the backdrop rather than the specific school your child would attend. A further 113 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they are newer or because they have not been inspected under the current framework, and they should not be read as anything one way or the other.
The usual warning applies and applies harder in rural Cornwall. A school being near your house is not the same as your child getting a place at it. Cornwall Council allocates on its own criteria, oversubscription is decided by rules rather than by geography alone, and in a town where the catchment stretches out across farmland, the difference between the school you can see and the school you get can be several villages. Check the current admissions position with the council before you build a house purchase around it.
Locally, Budehaven Community School is the secondary, and for practical purposes it is the secondary, because the alternatives involve a serious drive. Bude Primary Academy splits across separate infant and junior sites, which is the arrangement most families in the town use. Stratton Primary School serves the older settlement just inland. Beyond that the provision fans out into village schools including Marhamchurch Church of England Academy, Kilkhampton Junior and Infant School, Jacobstow Community Academy and St Mark's Church of England Academy, each small and each serving its own parish rather than the town. That pattern is worth understanding before you view: choosing a house in one of the outlying villages usually means choosing its school as well, because the practical alternative is a twenty-mile round trip twice a day in weather that comes in off the Atlantic sideways.
The upshot is a solid, undramatic set of options with one clear secondary and a scattering of small primaries, which is close to the best a town this size on this coast could reasonably offer. Schools are one of the stronger reasons to take Bude seriously.