Good, and unusually simple. There is a primary in the town and a secondary in the town, which is more than most places this size manage. Eight in ten graded settings across the county are rated good or better. The complication is not quality, it is geography: everything else is a drive down a lane. Parents here get a straightforward answer to a question that torments people in cities.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, and 138 of them, roughly eight in ten, come out good or better. Three are Outstanding, 31 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. A further 135 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they are new or because they have not yet been inspected, and folding those into the picture either way would be inventing an answer. The headline is a county where the ordinary case is a decent school, which is a duller finding than the league-table industry would like but a more useful one for anyone buying a house.
Those are county-wide numbers, not the grades of the specific schools your children would attend, and this is the point at which the caveat has to be said plainly: living near a school is not the same as getting into it. Devon County Council allocates places, distance is one criterion among several, and the register of who got in last year is a better guide than a map. Anyone whose purchase depends on a particular school should check the current admission arrangements for that school before exchanging, not after.
Chulmleigh Primary School sits in the town, and Chulmleigh Community College is the secondary, also in the town, which is the rare arrangement where a child can go from reception to sixth form without the family ever needing to plan a route. The area's other primaries are scattered through the surrounding villages, small, and reached by car or by school bus down roads that were laid out for carts. Chawleigh's primary has closed, so anyone working from an older list should update it.
Departmental journey-time modelling puts the average primary school in the area at about 10 minutes by car and 30 minutes on foot, with the average secondary at 17 minutes by car and 89 minutes walking. The walking figures tell you what they are meant to tell you. Public transport to a secondary averages 58 minutes, which is the sort of number that quietly converts a household into a two-car household.
Schools are the strongest thing this area has going for it after the low crime, and the pairing of a primary and a secondary inside the same small town is the kind of convenience that people who have done the school run in a city will recognise as a genuine luxury.