Good, and mercifully simple. There is one secondary and everybody goes to it. Four primaries sit within a short drive, two of them inside the town. Across the county, four in five inspected settings are rated good or better. The quality is here. The choice is not, which saves families a great deal of agonising.
Schools here are run by Devon, and Ofsted has published an overall grade for 172 settings across the county. Of those, 138 are good or better, three are outstanding, 31 require improvement and three are inadequate. A further 135 settings carry no published grade at all, which means they have not been graded rather than anything about how they teach. Those are county-wide numbers, covering everything from a moorland village primary to a large secondary in Exeter, so they describe the odds rather than the outcome. No child has ever been taught by a county average.
Living near a school is not the same as having a place at one. Admissions are decided by the county's rules, and distance is one factor rather than a promise. The school name appears in the listing. The appeals process does not.
South Molton Community College is the secondary, and for most families that decides itself. Journey times to the nearest secondary run at about 11 minutes by car and roughly half an hour on foot, which for rural Devon counts as unusually civilised. Primary is where the real decision sits. South Molton Community Primary School and South Molton United Church of England Primary School are both in the town, North Molton Primary School serves the village to the north, and the smaller parish primaries fill in the surrounding map. Typical journeys to a primary come out at around eight minutes by car or a quarter of an hour walking, which tells you these schools are embedded in the streets rather than parked on a bypass. There is also the Libra School, run by Blackford Education, for families wanting something outside the state pair. After that the register runs out, which is what a market town of this size honestly offers.
The town's primary school has one genuinely odd claim to fame. In the 1950s it was one of the schools studied by Iona and Peter Opie, the folklorists who spent their careers writing down the rhymes, insults and playground games children pass to each other without adult help. Somewhere in the archive of British childhood is what South Molton children were chanting seventy years ago. It is a strange sort of immortality, and better than most towns manage.
The catchment question that dominates buying decisions in cities barely applies here, because the pool is small enough that geography does most of the sorting before anyone fills in a form. That cuts both ways. Nobody is paying a premium for a postcode that gets them past a gate, and nobody has a fallback if the one secondary does not suit their child.
Schooling is one of the stronger arguments for buying in South Molton: a county record that holds up, primaries close enough to walk to, and a secondary that requires no strategy whatsoever. What it lacks is options, and that matters far less to parents once they are living here than it does while they are reading about it.