Torquay's schools are the quiet overachiever in a town better known for its bay. Twenty of the twenty-two graded settings in the authority are good or better. Two are outstanding. The primary results are solid, the secondary results respectable. And two of the state secondaries pay no attention whatsoever to where you live, which reorganises everything else about how this town talks about schools.
There are 17 mainstream state primaries in the area, and their maths score at the end of primary school averages 104. That is a comfortable, unspectacular number of the sort that suggests a system working properly rather than a handful of outliers dragging an average around. The primaries are spread thinly enough to matter locally, from Cockington on the western side to St Marychurch Church of England Primary and Nursery School up in the old borough to the north. Department for Transport modelled walking times put a typical primary about nine minutes from the front door, which in a town built up and down hills is a number to test with your own legs before trusting.
Five mainstream state secondaries sit in the area, averaging 53.7 on the main measure taken across a pupil's best eight subjects at sixteen, which rounds to 54. Two of those five are selective. Torquay Boys' Grammar School and Torquay Girls' Grammar School admit on the eleven plus and their own standardised test, so a good chunk of the town's secondary provision is allocated by examination rather than by address. The rest, including Torquay Academy and The Spires College, take everyone, and the sixth form options are attached to the same set of schools rather than sitting in a separate college in the town.
Ofsted has graded 22 settings across the Torbay authority, which covers more ground than Torquay alone. Twenty are good or better, two of those outstanding, two sit at requires improvement, and none is rated inadequate. A further 15 settings hold no published grade at all, which means exactly that and nothing more: not yet inspected, not secretly bad.
Now the part estate agents would rather you skimmed. Living near a school is not the same as getting into it, and in Torquay that gap is unusually wide. A listing that mentions the grammar schools is selling you a postcode for two institutions that allocate on a test result, not a walking distance. The non-selective secondaries run their own admissions rules and fill up in their own way. Anyone buying a house on the strength of a specific school gate should read that school's current admissions policy first, then decide whether the house is worth it on its own terms.
The practical shape of it is that families here make a decision at ten years old that families elsewhere never have to make. Some tutor for the exam and treat the outcome as a fork in the road. Some decline the whole business and send their children to a good comprehensive down the hill. Both routes end at schools Ofsted has judged well, which is more than most towns of this size can say, and the tutoring economy that has grown up around the eleven plus is a comment on parental anxiety rather than on the schools themselves. A typical secondary is about seventeen minutes on foot in the modelled walking times, so the daily logistics are manageable whichever way you go.
Schooling is the single strongest thing Torquay has going for it. A town that gets described in terms of its seafront and its season turns out to be one of the safer bets in the south west for getting a child through both ends of the state system without a compromise you have to explain to them later.