Good, and blessedly simple, because there is essentially one state school pathway and no agonising over it. Three state primaries in the area. One state secondary. Across Devon, roughly eight in ten graded settings are rated good or better. This is not a town where parents spend two years plotting a house move to land the right catchment, because the catchment is the town.
Primary provision covers three mainstream state schools in the area, and key stage 2 maths across them averages a scaled score of about 104. Saint John the Baptist Roman Catholic Primary School sits in the town itself, and Stoke Fleming Community Primary School serves the village along the coast road to the south. Getting there is a Dartmouth-specific negotiation: the Department for Transport's modelled journey times put a primary at roughly 19 minutes on foot and about 8 minutes by car, which sounds trivial until you factor in that most of those 19 minutes are vertical.
Secondary is one school, Dartmouth Academy, which runs as an all-through school and so takes the same children it started with. Its Attainment 8 score, the measure of how pupils perform across their best eight subjects at sixteen, comes in at around 45. The walk is longer, about 33 minutes, or roughly 10 minutes by car and 22 by public transport. The upside of a single all-through school is continuity. The downside is that if it does not suit your child, the alternative involves a river with no bridge for eleven miles and a ferry timetable.
The wider picture comes from Ofsted's inspections across Devon rather than this town alone. Of 172 settings in the county carrying a published overall grade, 138 are rated good or better, which is roughly eight in ten. Three hold an outstanding grade, 31 require improvement, and 3 are rated inadequate. A further 135 settings across the county hold no published grade at all, either because they are new or because they are yet to be inspected, which is not the same thing as a bad one, whatever the league-table websites imply.
Worth saying plainly: naming a school is not the same as securing a place at it. Admissions run on published criteria and distance measurement, not on the estate agent's confident assurance that the property is "in catchment", a phrase that has never once been checked by the person saying it. Anyone buying with a specific school in mind should confirm the current admissions arrangements with the local authority before exchanging, not after.
Beyond the state pathway, the town's most famous educational institution is the Royal Navy's officer training college, where the service trains its own officers alongside many from foreign navies. It sits on the hill above the estuary and takes precisely no primary applications, though it does mean Dartmouth is a town where children grow up watching people slightly older than them being marched about in the rain. There is also a long-established pre-school in the centre of town, housed in the old Victorian school rooms, running as a charity for the two-to-five bracket.
For a town this size, the schooling is one of Dartmouth's genuine strengths: strong county-wide inspection outcomes, respectable results at both key stages, and a structure so straightforward that the usual middle-class school-selection sport is simply unavailable here. The choosing was done for you. It turns out that was the good news.