The Excellence Hub
Four programmes that shape how a child thinks, speaks and makes
Speaking, reasoning, building, creating. Each runs alongside the academic timetable, and each teaches something a report card does not measure.
Why these four
The skills that outlast the syllabus
A child who can think clearly, say what they mean, build what they imagine and finish what they start is prepared for far more than an examination.
The Excellence Hub is EKIS's co-curricular programme, and it is deliberately narrow. Four programmes, each with its own method and its own hour, rather than a long list of activities a child samples and forgets.
They were chosen because they cover four different kinds of thinking. Ex-Talk is expression. Ex-Logic is reasoning. Ex-Tech is building. Ex-Create is making. A child moves between them and finds out, often for the first time, which one is theirs.
Ex-Talk
Public speaking and stagecraft
Ex-Talk — the idea, and the nerve to say it out loud
Ex-Talk runs on the format the TED stage made familiar: one speaker, one idea, a fixed number of minutes, and an audience that is actually listening. Children choose something they care about, work out what they are really trying to say, and then say it standing up.
The work happens before the stage. A talk is drafted, cut, and cut again. Children learn where a sentence is doing nothing, why an opening matters more than an ending, and what to do with their hands. Delivery is rehearsed in front of the group, because the only way to get used to an audience is to have one.
Speaking in public is the skill parents most often tell us they wish they had been taught. It is also the one that shows up everywhere afterwards — in a viva, an interview, a classroom answer, a first day at work.
What a child actually does
- Choosing and narrowing an idea worth a few minutes of an audience's attention
- Structuring a talk: the opening, the turn, the close
- Editing a draft down until every line earns its place
- Voice, pace and pauses — and what to do when you lose your place
- Delivering to a live audience, then watching the recording back
Ex-Logic
Reasoning, strategy and mental games
Ex-Logic — thinking, made into a habit
Ex-Logic treats reasoning as something to practise rather than something a child either has or does not. The instruments are the ones that have always done this job well: chess, the Rubik's cube, logic puzzles, and problems with more than one honest route to an answer.
Chess teaches consequence — every move gives something up. The cube teaches algorithm: a sequence, repeated exactly, that turns chaos into order. Puzzles teach the most useful habit of all, which is noticing when your first idea was wrong and being willing to start again.
What carries over is not the game. It is the pause before the move — checking a plan against what could go wrong before committing to it. That transfers to a mathematics problem, a science practical, and eventually to decisions with rather more at stake.
What a child actually does
- Chess: openings, tactics, and reading a position before moving
- The Rubik's cube, as an exercise in following an algorithm precisely
- Logic and lateral-thinking puzzles with more than one valid route
- Explaining a line of reasoning out loud, so the thinking becomes visible
- Spotting a flawed assumption early — including your own
Ex-Tech
Coding, robotics and things that work
Ex-Tech — build it, break it, fix it
Ex-Tech is a making programme. Children write code, wire circuits and assemble robots, and the measure of a session is whether the thing works at the end of it. Screens are a tool here, not the activity.
The method is deliberately project-first. A child starts with something they want to exist — a small app, a line-following robot, a sensor that reacts to the room — and picks up the coding, the logic and the debugging on the way to making it. Concepts introduced this way tend to stay, because they arrived attached to a problem.
Debugging is treated as the real lesson rather than an interruption. Something not working, and being taken apart until it does, is the most honest engineering experience a school can offer.
What a child actually does
- Writing code that produces something a child can show and use
- Robotics: assembly, sensors, and getting a machine to respond
- Debugging — finding the fault rather than starting over
- Planning a project, then adjusting the plan when reality disagrees
- Digital skills used for making, not only for consuming
Ex-Create
Art, craft and design
Ex-Create — a studio, not an art period
Ex-Create is set up to feel like a studio: materials out, work in progress on the table, and room to make something that was not on a worksheet. Drawing, craft, and design sit together, because a child who is making something rarely needs them separated.
The programme is as interested in finishing as in starting. A piece is planned, attempted, judged honestly, and often redone — which is where the useful part lives. Children learn to look at their own work and say what is not right yet without deciding they cannot do it.
Design brings the two halves together. Given a real constraint — a size, a material, a purpose — children find that creativity is not the opposite of discipline but what discipline is for.
What a child actually does
- Drawing and observation — looking properly before making
- Craft with real materials, and the patience the materials demand
- Designing to a brief: a size, a purpose, a constraint
- Critique that is specific and kind, given and received
- Carrying a piece through to finished, including the parts that go wrong
What is not settled yet
Which grades take which programme, how often each runs, and who leads them are being finalised with the academic team. Those details will be published here once the school confirms them — they are not stated now because they are not yet decided.
Programme names and methods on this page are current. If you would like to know how the Hub will work for your child's year specifically, the school office will tell you what is settled and what is not.
Take the next step, at your pace
Thirty seconds to enquire. A morning to visit. Clear steps when you are ready to apply.