Solid, small in number, and not really a choice so much as a sequence. There is one state primary in the area and one state secondary. Maths results at eleven sit just above the national average. The Attainment 8 score at sixteen sits a little under it. Most families here do not agonise over which school to pick, because the decision was made for them by geography before they arrived.
At primary level, the area has one mainstream state primary, Castle Cary Community Primary School, which dates from 1840 and carries the town's name in the way these things tend to. Key Stage 2 maths in the area averages a scaled score of 104, where 100 is the expected standard, so children here finish primary a shade ahead of where the national benchmark says they should be. Lovington Church of England Primary School sits nearby for families on the south-western side. A primary school is around a nine minute drive or a twenty-nine minute walk from a typical address here.
Secondary is Ansford Academy, the one mainstream state secondary in the area, sitting on the northern edge of town in Ansford. Its Attainment 8 score comes in at around 44, which is the pupil-weighted figure across the area's state secondaries and sits modestly below where a national average lands. That is a fair, unspectacular result, and it is the number that will do most of the work in any conversation you have with a parent already living here. The nearest secondary is around a twelve minute drive, or about fifty-two minutes on foot, which is the kind of walk teenagers do once and then negotiate their way out of.
Across Somerset as a whole, Ofsted has graded 101 of 140 settings as good or better, which is around seven in ten. Five are rated outstanding, 32 require improvement, and seven are rated inadequate. Those counts cover the whole local authority rather than Castle Cary specifically, so they describe the county a family is buying into rather than the school at the end of the road. A further 81 settings hold no published grade yet, which means not-yet-inspected rather than anything about their quality.
The usual caveat applies harder here than in a town with options. Living in Castle Cary does not entitle a child to a place at any named school. Somerset allocates on its own admissions criteria, and a school with the town's name on the sign is still a school with an oversubscription policy. If a particular school is the reason you are moving, check the admissions arrangements for the actual year of entry before you exchange, not after, because the version a seller describes over the kitchen table is usually the version from when their eldest started.
What the town has beyond that is thin by design. This is a small place with a primary, a secondary, and a village primary nearby, and that is the register. Families wanting choice between multiple secondaries are looking at a different sort of town, and probably a different price.
The schools here are decent rather than a selling point, which for a town this size is a reasonable outcome and quietly better than the alternative. Nobody moves to Castle Cary for the schools. Nobody leaves because of them either.