Good, and the choosing has largely been done for you. There is one secondary in the town, which removes an entire genre of parental scheming. The primaries are village-sized and spread across the surrounding parishes. Most of what has been graded in this county comes back on the right side of the line. Nobody here is renting a flat in a catchment for a year to game an admissions round, because there is nothing to game.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, the local authority these schools sit under, and 138 of them, about four in five, hold good or outstanding. Three are rated outstanding. Thirty-one are on requires improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than anything about how they teach. Those counts describe the whole county rather than this town, so read them as the weather rather than the forecast for any particular classroom.
Being nearest to a school is not the same as being offered a place at one. Admission runs on the county's rules and on how many families applied that year, and in small rural schools a single busy year-group can close the door on the family who moved in expecting the obvious answer. Anyone buying on the strength of a school should confirm the current admission position with the county before exchanging, not after, because the estate agent's version of a catchment is not a legal document.
Holsworthy Community College is the secondary, and it is the whole secondary conversation for the town. Holsworthy Church of England Primary School carries the town's name and sits alongside it. Out in the parishes the pattern is small village primaries: Bradworthy Primary Academy serves the northern side of this area, with Bridgerule Church of England Primary School and Clawton Primary School among the others of similar size within driving distance. They are the kind of schools where the head teaches, the intake is measured in dozens and the nativity play involves most of the village whether they have children or not.
Getting there is straightforward by rural standards. Department for Transport modelling puts a primary school about 17 minutes away on foot or eight minutes by car, and the secondary about 20 minutes on foot or eight by car. That is a walkable town-centre school run for families in Holsworthy itself, and a car journey for anyone who bought the farmhouse with the view.
One structural risk deserves naming before it surprises anyone. Five schools within reach of the town have closed in recent years, which is the standing condition of rural primary provision rather than a local scandal. Small intakes make small budgets, and small budgets eventually make decisions. The village school three miles from the house is three miles from the house for exactly as long as it stays open, so a buyer choosing a property on the back of one is taking a longer view than the admissions form suggests.
Schools are among the better arguments for living here. The county's graded schools mostly land where parents want them, the secondary question resolves itself before the second viewing, and the primaries are small enough that a child is a name rather than a data point.