The schools are the strong part of the answer. The village has its own primary. Four in five graded settings across the county come out good or better. The secondary is in Ilfracombe, and everyone gets there by bus or by parent. Quality is not the problem here. Distance is.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, the local authority this village sits in, and 138 of them are good or better. Three are outstanding, 31 require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings hold no published overall grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than not good enough, and folding them into the arithmetic would be dishonest in either direction. The obvious caveat is that Devon is enormous. An authority-wide figure includes schools a two-hour drive from the Bristol Channel coast, so treat it as a reassuring backdrop rather than a report card on any particular classroom your child would sit in.
Living near a school is not the same as getting into it. Naming a school in a property listing is an estate agent's move, not an admissions decision, and the only sound approach is to ask the school itself how far out it admitted from in recent years before you commit to a house on the strength of it.
Combe Martin Primary School is the one that carries the village name and the one most families here use. Berrynarbor Church of England Primary School sits in the next valley along, and West Down School covers the inland side, both of them the sort of small village primary where the whole school fits in one photograph. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts a primary school at roughly 8 minutes by car, about 16 on foot and around 13 by public transport, which is as close to a walkable school run as this stretch of coast manages.
Secondary is the harder proposition. The Ilfracombe Church of England Academy is the secondary school in the brief for this area, and getting there takes about 20 minutes by car or roughly 35 by public transport. The modelled walking time is around 100 minutes, which is a polite way of saying nobody walks it. That journey becomes the architecture of your weekday for five or seven years, and it is worth driving at eight in the morning in February before you decide it sounds manageable.
For schooling, Combe Martin does well. The county's inspection record is genuinely good, the village primary is on the doorstep, and the only real cost is the road to Ilfracombe once the children outgrow it.