The schools are one of the better arguments for living here. The village has its own primary carrying its own name. Across Devon, four in five graded schools come out good or better. Secondary means a journey, because there isn't one in the village. Strong grades, and a school run that grows a set of wheels at eleven.
Ofsted has graded 172 settings across Devon, and 138 of them, about four in five, sit at good or better. Three hold an outstanding grade. At the other end, 31 are at requires improvement and three at inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which means not yet inspected rather than anything about how they are doing. The scale is the thing to keep hold of: those counts cover the whole county, not the short list a South Brent family would actually apply to. A county-wide average is a comfortable thing to quote and an impossible thing to enrol in.
Living in the village is not the same as securing a place in it. Admission runs on each school's published oversubscription rules, and in a small rural intake one busy year group can make a catchment behave quite differently from the year before. Anyone buying on the strength of a particular school should read that school's own admission arrangements and its latest inspection report before the offer goes in rather than after the keys change hands. Listings mention the school. They are quieter about the paperwork.
South Brent Primary School is the one carrying the village's name, and for most families in the village itself it is the walk. The Department for Transport's modelled journeys, which date from 2019, put a primary school at about nine minutes by car from the average postcode across the wider area and about 25 minutes on foot, a figure stretched by the outlying hamlets rather than by the centre of the village. Breakthrough College is the only other education setting listed in the area. Secondary is where the arrangement changes: about 16 minutes by car to the nearest one, or about 44 minutes by public transport on that same modelled basis, and a modelled rural bus time from 2019 deserves rather more scepticism than a modelled car time.
Schools come out as one of the genuine strengths here, and nothing in the county's grades argues with that. The cost is not quality. The cost gets measured in miles from the age of eleven.