Exeter Road Community Primary School

What our curriculum is designed to achieve

Exeter Road Community Primary School is an inclusive community, committed to providing an emotionally and physically safe environment that is caring, stimulating, and challenging and where all children enjoy and achieve. We pride ourselves on having a calm and welcoming atmosphere where we take time to get to know each child and value the contribution they make to our school. At Exeter Road, we believe that every child can and must succeed.

We strive to ensure that children have the levels of literacy and numeracy to equip them with the skills to continue their learning journey and achieve personal and economic fulfilment throughout their lives.

We aim to provide all children with a broad and balanced curriculum. A curriculum that:

• Promotes curiosity and enthusiasm.
• Develops children’s knowledge and understanding of the world.
• Encourages independence and confidence.
• Builds resilience and resourcefulness.
• Develops logical and creative thinking.
• Encourages a tolerance and respect for others and the development of personal self-esteem.
• Is nurturing and develops the whole child.

We want high self-esteem, confidence, independence, spirit, happiness, enthusiasm, and motivation to characterise learners at Exeter Road enabling them to be prepared for life in the 21st century.

Exmouth is in a beautiful part of the country, and we want the children who attend our school to have a love and knowledge of the local area. Our curriculum takes learning beyond the classroom and provides children with experiences that enhance and enrich learning: we are committed to children being involved in as many outdoor learning experiences, trips, and visits as possible. However, we also want to provide the children with knowledge and experience of the world outside Exmouth. Our outdoor education programme and residential and non-residential trips are designed to develop this wider knowledge and understanding.  Children are offered swimming lessons in Years 3, 4, 5 and 6.  We work collaboratively with other local schools and organisations to provide the best educational opportunities we can for the children in our community.

We act to ensure positive partnerships with parents, valuing their views and working alongside them to encourage and support their children. Children are at the centre of all that we do. Our staff take time to listen carefully to their opinions and perspectives and ensure that learning has relevance, purpose and meaning.

Curriculum Intent

At Exeter Road, units of work are carefully chosen to enthuse and engage learners, but also to ensure good coverage and progression so that pupils develop secure understanding and a range of transferable skills. Teachers plan carefully so that, where conducive to children’s learning, ideas and concepts are connected and taught in cross-subject topics, while other subjects are taught in subject disciplines. For each topic, children are hooked into new learning with ‘Inspire Events’ – trips, visitors or dress-up days – and learning is shared with parents or our local community through a ‘Grand Finale’ – such as an open classroom, a class assembly or a pop-up gallery. The aim of these experiences is not only to enrich our curriculum, enthusing children, it is also to provide a stimulus for sharing a journey together. Lessons within a topic are shaped around a series of curricular goals and are planned to facilitate children gaining new skills and remembering new knowledge. Teachers plan exciting opportunities for the children to learn, giving them the knowledge, ideas, vocabulary and the motivation to question the world around them.   Through a hands-on experiential approach, we encourage our children to be more independent in their learning and challenge them to find out for themselves.   We promote independence, resourcefulness, and creative thinking, celebrating the ways in which children use what they have learnt to find out and explore more about an area of interest.

At the heart of our curriculum is a commitment to nurture a love of reading as this opens the door to all learning. Opportunities within oracy are planned into topics to allow children to explore ideas through talk, build their vocabulary and confidently present to different audiences.

We aim for all pupils to develop fluency and confidence in mathematics, in order to achieve mastery and succeed across the curriculum. Learning includes fluency, reasoning and problem solving.

As part of our curriculum, we encourage children to find out more about the lives of people in different countries cultures and religions, encouraging tolerance and respect for others. We aim to prepare our children for life in the 21st century, to be confident and positive in approaching the challenges they will encounter.  In History, for example, children are supported to learn and remember core knowledge by focusing on a 'key concept' that enables us make links between different historical periods. 

Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum

At Exeter Road Community Primary School, our EYFS curriculum provides opportunities for our children to develop as independent, confident, successful learners with high aspirations who know how to make a positive contribution to their community and wider society.

Through our child-led, language-rich curriculum we provide an environment that allows each child to display concentration, creativity, energy and persistence. High levels of well-being and involvement indicate deep levels of learning and lead to children achieving developmentally appropriate individual progress.

Our goal is to ensure that all children are happy and engaged and making individual progress. Our curriculum results in significant changes in a child’s learning capacity, leading to better outcomes in regulation, relationships, and resilience. We believe that children need rich opportunities to initiate ideas and activities so that they develop the learning characteristics that will support lifelong learning.

Through the EYFS curriculum that we provide the children will continually demonstrate their ability to:

• play and explore
• learn actively
• create and think critically

We ensure all children are inspired and motivated to actively participate in our curriculum in order that they experience enjoyment and develop the ability to continue their learning journeys beyond our Early Years.

Co-operative Values

Exeter Road is a school that supports the cooperative values & ethos, which, we believe, are fundamentally British values (tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs; Individual liberty; democracy; mutual respect; and the rule of law).  We, therefore, subscribe to and try to promote the following:

The Co-operative values of:

• Self-help
• Self-responsibility
• Democracy
• Equality
• Equity
• Solidarity

The Ethical values:

• Openness – nobody’s perfect, and we won’t hide it when we’re not
• Honesty – we are honest about what we do and the way we do it
• Social responsibility – we encourage people to take responsibility for our community and work together to improve it
• Caring for others – we regularly fund charities and local community groups.

At Exeter Road we believe that ‘Every Child Can Succeed’.

Our Curriculum 2024-2025