They are good, and better than a city with this reputation expects anyone to admit. Nine in ten graded settings come out good or better. A handful are outstanding. Three selective state grammars are still in business. For a place routinely written off as a dockyard with a nice view, the school register is the part of the paperwork that quietly argues back.
At primary level there are 71 mainstream state primaries in the area, and Key Stage 2 maths across them averages about 105. That average matters more than any single school on it, because a figure like that across seventy-odd schools is not two star performers dragging a weak field upwards. It is a city where most primaries are doing the job. Marine Academy Primary is the one whose name gives away what Plymouth thinks it is for, and the rest range from city-centre schools to ones on the far edges of Plympton and Southway where the housing gets newer and the playing fields get bigger.
Secondary is where the numbers get more interesting. There are 19 mainstream state secondaries in the area, with a pupil-weighted Attainment 8 of about 47. Sitting inside that number are Devonport High School for Boys, Devonport High School for Girls and Plymouth High School for Girls, three selective state grammars of the kind most English cities stopped running a generation ago. Selective schools admit on their own terms rather than on your address, which changes the entire logic of buying near one. There is also Scott Medical and Healthcare College, a secondary built around a single career path, which is either admirably direct or an unusually early moment to ask a fourteen-year-old what they want to be.
Ofsted has published a grade for 52 settings across the Plymouth local authority, and 47 of them are good or better, which is roughly nine in ten. Seven are rated outstanding, two require improvement and three are rated inadequate. A further 30 settings hold no published grade at all, either because they are new or because they have not been inspected under the current framework, so they sit outside the count rather than at the bottom of it. Those totals cover the whole authority, not only the streets in any one part of the city.
Naming a school is not the same as getting into it. Admission depends on the authority's arrangements, the school's own criteria and how many other families had the same idea in the same year, and the grammars run their own selection on top of all that. Estate agents talk about catchments with a confidence that the admissions process does not share. Anyone buying with a specific school in mind should read that school's current admissions policy and its most recent inspection report rather than a property listing, because the listing has never once been the document that decides.
Beyond the state system there is a single private all-through school, three universities and a large further education college, which together mean the city keeps a decent share of its own eighteen-year-olds rather than exporting all of them up the main line.
Schools are among the strongest things Plymouth has, and the strength is in the spread rather than in a couple of famous names. A city where the typical primary performs well, the secondaries hold a respectable average and nine in ten inspected settings come out good or better is not a place where parents need to buy a particular postcode and hope.