Good, and mostly a drive away. There is a primary school carrying the town's own name. The nearest secondary is the better part of half an hour of moorland road. Across the county, about eight in ten graded schools come out good or better. The teaching is not what you negotiate over here. The mileage is.
Ofsted has published overall effectiveness grades for 172 settings across Devon, the education authority this area belongs to, and 138 of them are rated good or better. That works out at roughly eight in ten. Three carry the outstanding grade, 31 require improvement and three are rated inadequate. A further 135 settings hold no published grade at all and sit outside those counts entirely, which makes them unmeasured rather than unsatisfactory. Worth keeping the scale in view: Devon is an enormous county, and a county-wide proportion sweeps in plenty of schools nobody in Lynton is ever going to drive to.
Naming a school is not the same as being given a place at it. Admissions run through the county's process rather than through the property particulars, and the word catchment appears in listings considerably more often than it appears in an actual admissions decision. Small rural schools fill in ways that surprise people who arrived expecting spare capacity to be a feature of the countryside. Anyone buying with a specific school in mind should confirm the current arrangements for the year they need, not the year they viewed.
The one with the town's name on it is Lynton Church of England Primary School, and Parracombe Church of England Primary School serves the next village along the moor. The rest of the primary options are scattered through the villages between here and Barnstaple, small church and community schools of the sort that have three classes and a field. For secondary, Pilton Community College is the option the area feeds toward. Pathfield School covers specialist provision across a wide catchment, which for families who need it is the single most consequential name on the list and the one worth ringing first.
Department for Transport modelling puts the nearest primary school at about nine minutes by car, roughly 17 minutes by public transport and around 22 minutes on foot. The nearest secondary is a different proposition entirely: about 33 minutes by car and roughly 58 minutes on public transport. Those figures date from 2019, and the driving times have aged better than the bus times, because roads stay where they are and rural services do not. What it means in practice is that the primary years feel local and the secondary years turn into a daily logistics exercise involving weather, a coach, and a hill.
The teaching quality around here is one of the genuinely strong parts of the case for the place, with the county's graded schools landing overwhelmingly on the right side of the line. The cost is not written on any inspection report. It is written on the odometer.