The schools are fine, which is the most useful thing anyone can say about schools. One primary sits in the village itself. A church primary serves the next village along. The secondary is under ten minutes away by car. Around seven in ten graded schools across the county come back good or better. Reassuring, and not the reason anybody pays over the odds for a house here.
Ofsted has published an overall grade for 140 settings across Somerset, and 101 of them come back good or better, so roughly seven in ten. Five hold outstanding. Thirty-two sit at requires improvement and seven at inadequate. A further 81 settings carry no published grade at all, which means untested rather than unimpressive, and folding them into the totals would be dishonest arithmetic. All of those counts cover the whole of Somerset rather than this corner of it, so they describe the pool a family here draws from, not the specific classrooms at the end of the road.
Naming a school is not the same as getting a place at one. Admissions run on the county's published arrangements and on how many applications land in a given year, and none of that is settled by whichever village an agent said you would be in. Anyone buying on the strength of a particular school should read the current admissions rules and last year's allocation outcome before the offer goes in, rather than discovering the distance rule in March.
In practice the shortlist is short. Castle Primary School is in Stoke-sub-Hamdon itself, with Norton Sub Hamdon Church School covering the parish next door towards Norton-sub-Hamdon. Secondary means Stanchester Academy. Department for Transport modelling from 2019 puts a primary at about 9 minutes' walk or roughly 6 minutes by car, and the secondary at about 10 minutes by car, 15 by public transport or 28 on foot. A walkable primary school run is one of those things nobody lists among their requirements and everybody misses when it goes, and here it is the ordinary arrangement rather than the lucky one.
On schools, the odds tilt slightly in a buyer's favour: a primary within walking distance, a secondary a short drive out, and a county record that comes back good more often than not. That is provision which quietly removes a worry rather than handing anyone an advantage.