The schools are solid, and the village runs to exactly one of them. Merriott Primary School is the local option, and it is the only local option. Secondary school means a car and somebody else's town. Across Somerset, roughly seven in ten graded settings hold a good or better verdict. Decent odds, no choice, and a school run that starts earlier than you would like.
Ofsted has graded 140 settings across Somerset, of which 101 are good or better, which is a little over seven in ten. Five hold an outstanding grade. Thirty-two are marked as requiring improvement and seven as inadequate. A further 81 settings carry no published overall grade at all, either because they have not yet been inspected under the current arrangements or because their inspection outcome is not graded that way, and those are not failures hiding in the numbers. All of this covers the whole local authority rather than Merriott itself, so it describes the pool a family draws from, not the school at the end of the lane.
Being close to a school is not the same as getting into it. Places are allocated by the local authority's admissions rules, and a village address confers no automatic right to any particular classroom. Oversubscription happens where a school is popular, and the arithmetic is applied without sentiment. Anyone buying on the strength of a school should check the current admissions arrangements and the most recent allocation round before they check the survey, because the survey is the cheaper of the two mistakes.
Merriott Primary School is the school that carries the village's name and the school most people here mean when they say the school. The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put a primary school at about 7 minutes by car and roughly 11 minutes on foot, which is a village-scale walk in a place where almost nothing else is walkable. Secondary is a different exercise: around 12 minutes by car, about 25 minutes by public transport and roughly 45 minutes on foot, with Crewkerne the nearest town of any size. Those modelled times date from 2019, and the public transport half of them has aged less gracefully than the driving half, so treat the car figure as the real one and the bus figure as an ambition.
The village has been schooling children on the same site since the building went up in 1876, which absorbed a Sunday school built in 1834. Continuity of that sort is either reassuring or a hint about the pace of change here, and both readings are correct.
For families, the practical shape is this. Primary is close, singular and walkable. Secondary is a commitment measured in mornings, and the household that has not thought about who drives, and on which days, will discover the answer in September rather than agree it in advance. Somerset's wider record is better than average without being a reason on its own to buy in the county.
The schools here sit comfortably above the middle, which is a real credit and a modest one. What Merriott offers is a good local primary and a secondary decision that belongs to whoever holds the car keys.