The schools are the reassuring part of moving here. Two primaries sit inside the village itself. The secondaries are elsewhere, in Cullompton and Uffculme, which is what a village of this size gets. Across the county, about eight in ten graded settings come out good or better. The question is not whether the schools are any good. It is whether you fancy the run.
Ofsted has published overall grades for 172 settings across Devon, the local authority Willand belongs to, and 138 of those come out good or better, which is about 80%. Three are rated Outstanding. Thirty-one require improvement and three are Inadequate, so the county is not uniformly excellent, and the difference between a good school and a struggling one here can be a few miles rather than a few streets. A further 135 settings hold no published overall grade at all, either because they have not been inspected or because their inspection type does not produce one. Those are blanks, not black marks, and treating them as bad news is the mistake people make when they read a table too quickly.
Those are county figures, not Willand's own scorecard. Devon is a big authority with market towns, moorland hamlets and coastal resorts in it, and the graded record folds all of them together. What it tells you is the odds in the area, not the grade at the gate of any particular school.
Willand School carries the village name and sits in it, alongside Willowbank Primary School. For secondary, the two that matter are Cullompton Community College and Uffculme School, both a drive or a bus ride away in the neighbouring towns. Beyond those, the surrounding parishes hold a ring of small village primaries, the sort with one class per year group where everyone knows whose dog got into the playing field. That is either exactly what you want for a five-year-old or exactly what you were escaping, and it is worth knowing which before you offer on a house.
None of the above is an admission guarantee. Devon County Council allocates places, distance from the school gate is one factor among several, and living opposite a school has never yet obliged anyone to let your child in. Oversubscription does what oversubscription always does, which is turn a postcode into a lottery ticket with better odds than most. Check the current admission arrangements for the specific school before you let the house survey influence the school decision, or the other way round.
On travel, the Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary at about 13 minutes on foot, roughly 7 minutes by car and around 13 by public transport, which is the definition of a walkable school run. The nearest secondary is a different animal: about 14 minutes by car, roughly 36 by public transport and over an hour walking. Those public transport figures are the oldest part of that modelling and services have been reorganised since, so treat the bus number as the softest of the three and the car time as the reliable one.
Schools are one of Willand's genuine strengths, with a strong county-wide record and two primaries within the village boundary. The compromise arrives at eleven, when the school run stops being a walk and becomes a journey somebody has to make twice a day.