Placements

The University of Exeter works with schools across the South West. You will be placed in two schools during your training year. 

You should consider when applying, what your preferred placement area would be within our partnership region.  Our partnership areas are 'East & South Devon', 'Dorset & Somerset', 'North Devon' and 'West Devon & Cornwall'.

You can then discuss at interview which of the partnership area placement options is the best fit for your circumstances. Following acceptance of a formal offer, you will then be asked to provide more specific detail about your placement preferences.  For our Primary courses, placements are usually within commutable distance of Exeter but you can request to be placed anywhere within our Partnership area.  We advise that you apply as early in the recruitment cycle as possible if location is important to you. Our East/South Devon partnership area (which includes Exeter-area placements) is our most popular area. All available placements in this area may therefore get allocated before the end of the recruitment cycle.

There is also the opportunity to apply for a London Partner School for the summer placement, more information is provided about this once you start the course. 

Please note, anyone who submits an application to one of our PGCE programmes after 01 June 2026 will be considered a ‘late applicant’  for the purposes of placement allocation.  This is because we inform our partnership schools in early July of the number of trainees we have scheduled for them to have for each placement.  While we will do everything we can to meet your placement requirements after this date, we are limited in how much we can make changes to planned placements and liaise with schools about additional placements once they break up for the summer holidays. We therefore ask you to consider how flexible you can be in terms of placement location if you are applying after this date.

In addition, if we get to the point where we know we have run out of placements in any of our four partnership areas, we will add a note to the DfE Find entry for that particular course indicating this.  So please do check the DfE Find site this if you are considering applying later in the recruitment cycle.

In addition, the following map shows the location of our Partnership schools where we have placed primary trainees over the past three years:

The University of Exeter works with schools across the South West. You will be placed in two schools during your training year. You should consider when applying, what your preferred placement area would be within our partnership region.  Out partnership areas are 'East & South Devon', Dorset & Somerset', 'North Devon' and 'West Devon & Cornwall'.

You can then discuss at interview which of the partnership area placement options is the best fit for your circumstances. Following acceptance of a formal offer, you will then be asked to provide more specific detail about your placement preferences.  We advise that you apply as early in the recruitment cycle as possible if location is important to you. Our East/South Devon partnership area (which includes Exeter-area placements) is our most popular area. All available placements in this area may therefore get allocated before the end of the recruitment cycle.

Please note, anyone who submits an application to one of our PGCE programmes after 01 June 2026 will be considered a ‘late applicant’  for the purposes of placement allocation.  This is because we inform our partnership schools in early July of the number of trainees we have scheduled for them to have for each placement.  While we will do everything we can to meet your placement requirements after this date, we are limited in how much we can make changes to planned placements and liaise with schools about additional placements once they break up for the summer holidays. We therefore ask you to consider how flexible you can be in terms of placement location if you are applying after this date.

In addition, if we get to the point where we know we have run out of placements in any of our four partnership areas, we will add a note to the DfE Find entry for that particular course indicating this.  So please do check the DfE Find site this if you are considering applying later in the recruitment cycle.

In addition, the following map shows the location of our Partnership schools where we have placed secondary trainees over the past two years.