The schools are one of the strongest things about the place. Around eight in ten inspected settings across Devon are rated good or better. The town has its own primary and a secondary that predates almost every other institution in it. The village next door has a primary of its own. For a town this size, the education question is answered before most buyers get round to asking it.
The inspection record is a county picture rather than a town one. Ofsted has published an overall grade for 172 settings across Devon, and 138 of them are rated good or outstanding, which is about 80%. Three carry an outstanding grade. Thirty-one sit at requires improvement and three at inadequate, so the county is not flawless and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A further 135 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they have not been inspected under the current arrangements or because their type is not graded that way. Those are not bad schools, they are unmeasured ones, and treating a blank as a black mark is the single most common mistake parents make when reading an inspection register.
The other mistake is assuming a school on the doorstep is a school your child attends. Admission is decided by the local authority's allocation process, not by the estate agent's floorplan, and every year a number of families discover that living within sight of a set of gates and being offered a place behind them are separate achievements. Before committing to an address on the strength of a school, check the actual admissions position for the year your child would start. It costs an afternoon and saves a spring.
The King's School is the secondary here, founded in 1545 by Henry VIII as a grammar and now a comprehensive, which is a long run by any measure and gives the town something most places of this size gave up decades ago. Ottery St Mary Primary School serves the town itself. West Hill Primary School covers the village to the south west, which matters if you are looking at property out there rather than in the centre. Department for Transport modelled journey times, which date from 2019, put a primary school about 17 minutes away on foot or around eight minutes by car, and a secondary about 31 minutes on foot or roughly ten minutes by car. Families in Tipton St John, Alfington and Whimple are looking at the car or the bus for at least one leg of that, which is normal for East Devon and still worth knowing before you buy somewhere with a single-track lane between you and the school run.
What that adds up to is a genuine strength rather than a polite one. Between a county record that holds up, a primary in the town, another in the village and a secondary with four and a half centuries of continuous operation behind it, Ottery gives parents fewer things to worry about than almost anything else on this page does.