Primary is the strong bit, and it is genuinely fine. Secondary is a car journey, and that reshapes the family week more than any inspection grade will. Across the county, roughly seven in ten graded schools sit at good or better. The town's own school arrived at its current shape through a merger, which is what Somerton has been doing with schools for centuries. Good local primaries, no local secondary. That is the whole answer, and everything below is the detail.
Ofsted has published an overall grade for 140 settings across Somerset, the local authority this area belongs to, and 101 of them are good or outstanding. Five hold an outstanding grade. Thirty-two are rated requires improvement and seven inadequate, which is the part of the county picture nobody puts in an estate agent's window. A further 81 settings carry no published overall grade at all, either because they are too new or because they have not been inspected under the current arrangements. Those are not bad schools, they are unmeasured ones, and treating them as a mark against the county would be dishonest. All of these counts cover the whole of Somerset rather than the Somerton area alone, so they describe the water the local schools swim in, not the schools themselves.
Two things follow from that which parents routinely learn too late. A school being the nearest one to a house is not the same as a place being available in it, and admission is decided by the authority's criteria rather than by the postcode on the listing. Anyone buying with a specific school in mind should confirm the current admission arrangements and last year's allocation position before the offer goes in, not after the removal van has been booked.
The school carrying the town's name is King Ina Church of England Academy, formed in 2014 when Somerton's infant and junior schools combined, the junior side of which traces back to a school founded in 1851 by the Pinney family. Somerton has been merging, renaming and re-founding its schools since a grammar school opened here in the 1570s, so the current arrangement is less an upheaval than a habit. Out in the villages the pattern is the same in miniature, with Charlton Mackrell Church of England Primary School and Keinton Mandeville Primary School serving their own patches, small rolls, short walks, and a catchment defined mostly by which lane you live on. The rest of the provision around the area follows that shape: village primaries, church foundations, and not many of them.
Secondary is where the geography bills you. There is no secondary school inside the area, and the Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest one at about 17 minutes by car, about 37 minutes by public transport and roughly 93 minutes on foot, against about 8 minutes by car to a primary. In practice that means the primary years are walkable and the secondary years are not, and the family that arrives with a seven-year-old and no plan for a second car finds out about it four years later. Anyone with a teenager should test the actual bus arrangement for their chosen school before they commit, since a modelled journey time is not a timetable.
Schools here are solid rather than spectacular: a decent stock of good primaries, a county record that is respectable without being a selling point, and a secondary situation that runs on car keys. Families do well in Somerton, provided they do the maths on the school run before they fall for the house.