Solid, without a single school anyone drives across the island for. Most graded settings on the Isle of Wight come out good or better. One holds an Outstanding. A handful sit at Requires Improvement, and everyone locally knows which. This is a place where the schools are fine and the parents have stopped pretending otherwise.
Ofsted has graded 23 settings across the Isle of Wight, and 16 of them, roughly seven in ten, hold Good or better. One carries Outstanding. Seven sit at Requires Improvement, and none are rated Inadequate, which is the number that matters most in that sentence: there is no school in the local authority currently judged to be failing. Those counts cover the whole island rather than East Cowes alone, because a town this size does not generate a meaningful sample on its own. A further 16 settings hold no published overall grade at all, either because they are too new or because they fall outside the graded framework, and folding them into the picture either way would be dishonest.
Within East Cowes itself, Queensgate Foundation Primary carries the town's own catchment in practice, and Holy Cross Catholic Primary School gives the alternative for families who want it. Priory School is the other named setting in the area. Secondary provision generally means travelling, and the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts a secondary school at around 18 minutes by car, about 28 by public transport, and roughly 81 minutes on foot, which is the number that quietly settles the school-run question for most households here. A primary is much closer: about eight minutes by car and roughly 12 on foot.
Being in East Cowes does not get you a place at any particular school. Isle of Wight Council allocates places, oversubscription criteria do the deciding, and distance from the gate is only one input among several. Faith schools apply their own criteria on top of that. Nobody should buy a house on the assumption that the nearest primary is the one their child will attend, and the households who work out the admissions rules before they offer on a property are the households who avoid a difficult March.
The wider island offering is what it is: a mixed set of primaries with mostly Good grades, a smaller number of secondaries serving a dispersed population, and a geography that means the choice of secondary is often made by the bus route rather than by the prospectus. That is not a criticism of the schools. It is a description of what it means to educate children on an island where the main road is a ferry.
Better than the island's reputation suggests, and comfortably clear of anywhere with a genuine problem. Not the reason you move here, but not the reason you rule it out either.