Good, right up until your child turns eleven. The town has its own primary and it is walkable in under ten minutes. Secondary is a drive across the edge of the moor, every morning, in whatever the weather has decided to do. Across the wider county, roughly eight in ten inspected settings come out good or better. Teaching is not the problem here. Mileage is.
Ofsted has published grades for 172 settings across Devon, the authority this town belongs to, and rates 138 of them good or better, which is roughly eight in ten. Outstanding is genuinely rare, at three. At the other end, 31 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than anything about how they teach. These are county-wide numbers rather than a scorecard for this town, and Devon is big enough to contain a great many different school runs.
Naming a school in a property listing is not the same as having a place at one. Admissions are decided by the authority's rules and by whoever else applied that year, so buying a house for a particular school gate is a bet rather than a transaction, and it is a bet that gets settled in spring by people who have never seen your kitchen extension.
Moretonhampstead Primary School carries the town's name and does the town's job. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts a primary school about nine minutes away on foot or seven by car, which is the sort of arrangement people move here for and then quietly stop mentioning. Secondary is the other story: about 32 minutes by car, about 66 by public transport, and the walk is modelled at the two-hour ceiling, which is the model's polite way of saying do not attempt it. South Dartmoor Community College is where that journey ends. Chagford Church of England Primary School serves the neighbouring town this page also covers, and Widecombe-in-the-Moor Primary is a useful reminder that moorland primaries are small and scattered rather than conveniently clustered. Beyond those, the reachable register is a spread of village and small-town primaries, church and community alike, most of them serving a few hundred houses apiece.
Devon also carries settings that sit outside the ordinary primary and secondary split, Running Deer School and Sands School among them. Having genuine alternatives to the standard route within driving distance is not something most towns of this size can claim, and for some families it turns out to matter more than the inspection grade of the nearest option.
Schools are one of the strongest things going for this place, which is not the sentence most people expect about a town at the top of Dartmoor. The primary is on the doorstep, the county's graded picture is a good one, and the price of all of it is a secondary-years commute that somebody in the household has to agree to drive.