Solid at the small end, and then it becomes a driving question. Two primaries sit in the town, split the old-fashioned way into infants and juniors. The nearest secondary is around 35 minutes away by car. Most of the county's graded schools land good or better, and the ones that do not are a real minority rather than a rumour. Schooling here is straightforward until a child turns eleven, at which point the school run stops being a walk and starts being a commute.
Ofsted has graded 140 settings across Somerset, and 101 of them are good or better, which is roughly seven in ten. Five carry an outstanding grade. Thirty-two require improvement and seven are inadequate. A further 81 settings hold no published grade at all, which means they have not been inspected under the current arrangements rather than anything sinister. Those counts cover the whole local authority, from Exmoor down to the Levels, so they describe the pool a Dulverton family draws from rather than the two buildings at the end of the road.
Worth saying plainly: a school being near you is not the same as a school taking you. Admission runs on the local authority's criteria, and proximity is one input among several rather than the whole answer. Anyone choosing a house on the strength of a particular school should read that school's own admission arrangements for the year they are applying, not the year they are viewing.
The town's own provision is an infants school and Dulverton Junior School, which between them get a child from reception to the end of primary without anyone learning a new postcode. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put a primary at about 9 minutes by car, 25 on foot and 16 by public transport, which is the kind of arithmetic that makes people move to a small town in the first place. Secondary is the other story: about 35 minutes by car, around 50 by public transport, and outside the walking band entirely. That is a real journey, done twice a day, in weather that comes off the moor and takes an interest.
Beyond those two, the rest of the choice sits in the surrounding towns and villages rather than in Dulverton itself, which is what happens when a place has a population that would fit inside a single urban secondary. Families in Brompton Regis, Exebridge and Exton are running the same calculation with a few more miles on it.
The schools are better than middling and short of remarkable, which is an honest place for them to sit. The grades hold up; it is the geography that asks something of you, and it asks it every weekday morning for five years.