Good, and there are barely any of them. Four primaries and one secondary serve the whole eastern end of the peninsula. The secondary exists because parents got organised and built it themselves. Around eight in ten graded settings across the county come out good or better. Small choice, decent quality, and no second option if the one you want is full.
Ofsted has graded 86 settings across Dorset, and 68 of them, roughly four in five, are rated good or better. Two hold an outstanding grade. Seventeen sit at requires improvement and one at inadequate. A further 52 settings in the county carry no published grade yet, which means nothing either way and should not be read as a verdict. Those numbers cover the whole local authority, which stretches a long way inland from this coast, so they describe the county's general standard rather than the four schools on your doorstep.
The primaries are Swanage Primary School, Swanage St Mark's Church of England Primary School, and St Mary's Catholic Primary School, with St George's Church of England Primary School just west at Langton Matravers. The Swanage School is the town's only secondary. It opened after the county moved away from its three-tier system and closed the middle schools, at which point the town faced sending every eleven-year-old over the hill to Wareham. A parent and teacher group put together a free school proposal, the Department for Education accepted it in October 2011, and the school opened in September 2013 in temporary accommodation before moving into its own building in Easter 2014. Whatever your view of free schools generally, a town that builds its own secondary rather than accept a daily coach out of the valley has told you something about itself.
Being in the town does not entitle you to a place at any of these. Admission runs on the published criteria for each school and each year, and a school with a religious character applies its own faith-based rules on top. Distance from the gate matters, sibling links matter, and none of it is settled by which side of a road you buy on. Check the current criteria and the recent allocation outcomes for the specific school before you let a house purchase turn on it, because on a peninsula with one secondary the fallback option is a long drive rather than a different postcode.
That geography is the real constraint. Everything else on the Isle of Purbeck sits a bus ride or a car journey away along a single main road, and the alternatives at secondary level mean crossing the peninsula or the harbour. Studland, Worth Matravers and the smaller settlements around them feed into this same small set of schools. It works well when your child is placed where you wanted. It works badly the year the numbers do not fall your way, because there is no equivalent school two streets over.
Families moving here for the schools are getting a genuinely strong offer: a county-wide picture that is well above what most places manage, four primaries within a short radius, and a secondary that exists because the town refused the alternative. The catch is not quality, it is choice, and choice is the thing you cannot buy your way out of here.