Good, in the least dramatic way possible, which is exactly what schooling should be. Four in five graded settings across the county come out good or better. Three hold the top grade. Two secondaries sit in the town itself, and the villages around send their teenagers in rather than the other way round. The quality is not the interesting part. Admissions are.
Ofsted has published overall grades for 172 settings across Devon, the education authority this town sits in, and 138 of those are rated good or outstanding, which is roughly four in five. Three are outstanding, 31 require improvement and 3 are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published overall grade at all, which means not yet inspected under the current arrangements rather than quietly failing. The honest caveat is scale: Devon runs from Dartmoor to the coast, so that ratio describes an authority the size of a small country, not the two streets you are actually choosing between. Read it as reassurance about the system and then go and look at the individual school.
Nothing about living near a school entitles anyone to a place in it. Admission is settled by the authority's oversubscription rules and by whoever else applied that year, which is why the phrase "close to well-regarded schools" in a property listing is a description of a distance and not an offer. Parents who work out the rules before they choose the house tend to be calm in March. Parents who assume the map is the answer tend not to be.
At secondary, Coombeshead Academy and Newton Abbot College are the two the town runs on, and they take in children from the villages spread around it, so the school run here is a regional event rather than a local one. There is also a university technical college in the town for older teenagers who want the technical route rather than the standard sixth form, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a town this size to hold. At primary, the register is long and mostly unremarkable in the good sense, with Wolborough Church of England Nursery and Primary School carrying the name of the old manor the town grew out of and Decoy Primary School named for the ground where the Forde House estate once trapped wildfowl for the table. Stover School is the private option, tucked into a corner of the old Templer estate for families who want that and can fund it.
Schooling is one of the stronger things this town has going for it. The grades hold up, the secondary choice is real rather than nominal, and the only work left for a parent is reading the admissions rules properly instead of trusting the postcode to do it for them.