The schools are good. The choice is not. One state primary serves the town, and its Key Stage 2 maths average sits at a hundred and four. Across Devon, roughly eight in ten graded settings are good or better. Secondary means leaving the peninsula, by car if you have one and by bus if you do not. Quality is the settled part of this question. Logistics is the part that decides your mornings.
There is one mainstream state primary in the area, Salcombe Church of England Primary School, and it carries the town's name in the way small-town primaries usually do. Key Stage 2 maths comes in at an average scaled score of 104. Getting there is about seven minutes by car, about eleven on foot and about nine on public transport, using the Department for Transport's modelled journey times from 2019. Those distances have not moved since. The bus timetable behind them may well have.
Ofsted has published grades for 172 settings across Devon, of which 138 are good or better, which is about eight in ten. Three are outstanding, 31 require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings across the authority hold no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected under the current arrangements rather than anything about their quality. All of that describes Devon as a whole, a large and mostly rural authority stretching a long way from this estuary, so treat it as the weather rather than the forecast for one particular street.
Naming a school is not the same as getting into it. Admissions run on the local authority's rules, and distance and sibling priority do the deciding, not the wording in a property listing. Estate agents on this coast will happily attach a school to a house. The admissions office has never read one of those listings and is not about to start.
Secondary is where the geography puts its hand up. The nearest secondary schools sit off the peninsula, at roughly 17 minutes by car, about 42 minutes on public transport and about 87 minutes on foot, again on the 2019 modelling. Nobody is walking it. What that gap actually means is that from eleven onwards, your child's day is shaped by a road out and a road back, and that the school run stops being a walk to the end of the street and becomes a fixed commitment in the family diary for seven years.
For education, this corner of Devon is one of the stronger cards Salcombe holds. The results are there, the grades across the authority are there, and the only real cost is that you will spend a decade driving to collect the benefit.