The schools here are a strength, and the town does something a lot of coastal places of this size cannot: it educates its own children without exporting them at eleven. There is a secondary in the town. There are primaries on both sides of the estuary. Across the county, roughly eight in ten graded settings are rated good or better. The thing to check is not the county average but which specific school your address actually gets you into.
Ofsted's published grades for Devon, the authority Teignmouth sits inside, cover 172 settings with an overall effectiveness grade. Of those, 138 are good or better, which is about eight in ten. Three are rated outstanding, 31 require improvement and three are rated inadequate. A further 135 settings hold no published overall grade at all, either because they are new, converted, or not yet inspected under the current arrangements, and their absence from the count says nothing about them in either direction. These figures describe the whole of Devon rather than this town alone, so treat them as the weather rather than the forecast for one street.
That distinction matters more here than parents expect. A school two minutes from the front door is not the same thing as a place at that school. Admission is settled by the local authority's oversubscription criteria, applied after applications close, and no amount of "walking distance to a good primary" in a listing changes the order that process runs in. If a specific school is the reason you are buying a specific house, the sequence is to read that school's current admission arrangements and its most recent inspection report before you offer, not after the survey comes back.
Teignmouth Primary School carries the town's name and sits in the town itself, with Hazeldown School the other large primary serving the area. Shaldon Primary School covers the village on the far bank of the estuary, which is a genuinely different journey rather than a slightly different postcode. Our Lady and St Patrick's Roman Catholic Primary School is the faith option, with its own admission arrangements that work differently from the rest. Beyond those, several more primaries serve the surrounding villages, including Bishopsteignton School up the estuary, and they behave like village schools do: small, oversubscribed in some years, quiet in others.
For secondary, Teignmouth Community School, Exeter Road is the destination for most families in the town, and it draws from the villages around it as well as from Teignmouth itself. Trinity School is the other secondary-age school on the register for the area. Between them, a family here has a realistic in-town answer for the eleven-to-sixteen years, which removes the daily forty-minute negotiation that families in smaller Devon settlements are stuck with.
Individual grades move. A school inspected three years ago and a school inspected last term are not comparable on the strength of a number in a property listing, and inspection outcomes get republished without anybody telling the local estate agents. Ofsted's register is the only current source, and it takes about ninety seconds to check.
On schools, Teignmouth is in a strong position for a town this size: a county grading picture where most settings are good or better, a secondary in the town rather than at the end of a bus route, and primaries close enough to walk to on both banks. The work left for the buyer is narrow and specific, and it is about one school and one address rather than the town as a whole.