The schools are one of the better reasons to be here. Across the county, four in five inspected settings hold a good or better grade. The town has its own comprehensive with a sixth form, which is not a given in a place this size. There is an independent option as well, so both routes exist inside the same postcode. For a small coastal town whose main industry is a nice view, that is a decent hand.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, the local authority Sidmouth sits in, and 138 of them are good or better. Three are outstanding, 31 require improvement, and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings hold no published overall grade at all, which means they have not been graded rather than graded badly. All of this is a county-wide count, not a Sidmouth one, so read it as the standard of the system this town buys into rather than a scorecard for the four or five gates you will actually stand at.
None of it buys you a place. Admission is decided by the local authority's rules and by how many other families applied that year, not by which street the listing says is in catchment. Estate agents use the word catchment as though it were a boundary drawn in wet cement. It is a set of criteria applied annually, and the criteria are honest without being generous. Check the current admissions arrangements for the specific school before you let it move your offer.
Sidmouth College is the town's comprehensive and the anchor of the whole arrangement, taking pupils from well beyond the Sid Valley, including from Exmouth and Exeter. Ofsted graded it good in 2012, an inspection old enough that the pupils it described have long since left, so treat it as history rather than a current verdict and read the school's most recent report yourself. Beneath it, Sidmouth Church of England Primary School is the town's own, with Sidbury Church of England Primary School and Newton Poppleford Primary School serving the villages up and out of the valley. One structural quirk worth knowing before you move: the state system here splits the infant and junior stages rather than running a single primary, so your child changes schools once more than you were expecting, and you get to do the first-day photograph twice.
St John's School is the independent alternative, taking pupils from the early years through to sixth form and boarding overseas pupils, which in a town of this scale means the private option is a genuine choice rather than a token one. The rest of the provision is the ordinary spread of village primaries around the valley, and it does the job without needing individual introductions.
Schools are the part of Sidmouth that quietly outperforms the rest of it. If you are moving here for the children rather than for the coast path, the numbers are on your side, and the thing to spend your energy on is the admissions form rather than the worry.