The schools are good, and one of them was here before most of the residents were. A single campus carries a child from primary all the way through to secondary without a change of address. Primary results are solid. Secondary results are respectable rather than showy. For a town whose oldest pupils have barely finished growing up inside it, that is a strong hand to be holding.
At primary level, five mainstream state primaries serve the area, and key stage 2 maths across them averages about 103. St Martin's Church of England Primary and Nursery is the one inside the town that opened alongside the first houses in 2012, and Cranbrook Education Campus takes primary-age children too. Broadclyst Community Primary School covers the older village nearby. Department for Transport modelling puts the typical primary about a seventeen minute walk away, or eight minutes in the car for anyone who has already lost that particular argument with the weather.
Secondary is thinner on options and better than the thinness suggests. Two mainstream state secondaries serve the area, Cranbrook Education Campus and Clyst Vale Community College, and the pupil-weighted Attainment 8 score across them comes out at 45. The modelled walk to secondary runs to about forty minutes, or eleven by car. Having the secondary on the same site as the primary is the single most underrated feature of the place for anyone with two children three years apart.
Ofsted grades cover the whole of Devon rather than this town alone, and across the authority 138 of the 172 settings with a published overall grade are good or better, which is roughly four in five. Three are outstanding, 31 require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected or not graded, and not a verdict of any kind. Anyone reading the county-wide numbers as a promise about one particular classroom is doing arithmetic the inspectors never signed off.
Being near a school is not the same as being offered a place at it. Admissions are run by the local authority against published criteria that can shift year to year, and oversubscription does what oversubscription always does, which is turn a walkable school into somebody else's walkable school. Check the current admissions arrangements for the specific school before the address becomes a decision rather than a preference.
Schools are among the strongest things Cranbrook has going for it, which is a rare sentence to write about a town this young. The primaries perform, the secondary provision is real rather than theoretical, and the county-wide inspection record is sound. Buy here and the education question is largely answered before you unpack.