In this article, former assistant principal and Chartered Manager Pete Mattock shares his top tips for creating a great transition.
Find out how Educake can help smooth the transition to secondary school with new transition quizzes for year 7s, perfect for identifying knowledge gaps.
Transition doesn’t start in the summer of year 6
The transition from primary school to secondary school is one of the most important points in pupils’ school experience. Getting it right sets your new cohort off to a positive start, giving them the best chance of success over their remaining school years. Getting it wrong can delay progress and put pupils and staff on the back foot for months or longer.
School leaders, of course, will know that the process of transition starts way before the summer of year 6. Work begins in earnest when secondary school places are announced in January, but there will be conversations and information sharing going on across the year. For key pupils, this could be as low as year 5 or year 4.
However, for many teaching staff, it often feels like transition begins when pupils arrive for their transition visits in the summer before they start at the school. Even then, some staff won’t meet the pupils that they will be teaching during this time.
Now, if new staff are coming in, this might be unavoidable, but, where possible, I would always advocate for making time across the year for teachers to observe and work with pupils in different primary schools, or to bring pupils into your school for special events.
This might be departments running special events, e.g. master classes for primary cohorts (either at your school or in your feeder schools), or supporting initiatives like primary maths or coding challenges. Anything that gets teaching staff interacting with the pupils and staff of your feeder primary schools.
If you do have new staff starting in the following academic year, can you schedule an induction day for when your new cohort are in school for transition visits? If budget allows, their current employer might allow for extra induction days in exchange for compensation – particularly once exams are over. Or, if the new staff member is an ECT1, could you pay them for the week or two to finish the school year on ‘supply terms’ (if you can’t start their full contract from July), and involve them with transition and some of their classes/pupils for the following year?
For those students who may particularly struggle with the transition, involving older pupils, through a mentoring program is a great way to build skills for these pupils, and creates another connection that the year 7 pupil will have when they join the school. Involving these pupils in transition visits to primary schools is an excellent way to establish these relationships.
Ensure as much information as possible is available for people
Plenty of information comes into secondary schools from feeder primaries. Assessment outcomes, information about children with SEND, information about friendships or issues with other pupils.
However, sometimes it can be the case that not all of this information is available to staff early enough – sometimes not until they arrive back for the new school year. Making sure that staff can use this information during time like gained time to plan for the year ahead is important.
Of course, this means that things like timetables and groupings need to be organised in time for staff to engage with the correct information for the pupils they will be teaching. The earlier these sorts of things can be sorted, the better staff can feel prepared for their incoming pupils.
There are also other sources of information that can be incredibly valuable for department teams. Alongside assessment information, can you get hold of the books that pupils’ have used during year 6 for the last few weeks of the school year? Records of pupils’ work on online platforms that they may have engaged with? Giving department teams access to these can help with ensuring that early experiences for pupils can be tailored more specifically to their needs.
Another group that needs as much information as they can are the pupils themselves – the more information they have, the more you can allay their fears of the unknown. Form tutors play a crucial role in this. When children have one significant adult whom they know they will see every day (like their teacher at primary school), it gives them a sense of stability.
If possible, involve form tutors in transition visits so that pupils can begin to form relationships with them before transition day. If this isn’t possible – for example, if a member of staff who hasn’t yet joined the school is set to be a year 7 form tutor – maybe by bringing pupils a photo and letter welcoming pupils to their new form.
As well as form tutor information for pupils, can you share information about others in the tutor group? Can you share details with primary schools about which form each pupil from that school is slated to go into? This allows pupils to know which of their familiar peers will be with them during the transition – as well as giving primary schools a final chance to flag any issues that you may have inadvertently created with your groupings.
You should also include ensuring proactive work with parents or carers, involving your staff. Many schools host an open evening and/or open days to encourage parents or carers to apply for the school, but consider holding similar events after you know which pupils will be joining your school so that staff and parents or carers have an opportunity to get to know each other and talk about the children that will be joining your school.
Whilst this often happens with form tutors, with parents or carers able to meet the form tutors either late in year 6 or early in year 7, consider the possibility of broadening this out so that parents and carers have a chance to meet and talk with as many of their child’s new teachers as possible, and can provide their perspective on what their child might need to be successful.
In short, anything that can give insight into specific strengths that a future class may have, or areas that they might need more support with, should be sought and shared.
Ensure your norms are clearly established and consistent
Your norms are the ways that your school operates, the culture of the school, that transcends your published rules or policies.
No matter what your policies or procedures say should happen in your school, what will determine more than anything how your new year 7 adapt to life in your school is how well you establish your norms with them, and how consistent they are across the school.
Some schools hold a ‘boot camp’, where the new year 7 attend school on their own, without the other year groups present, where they induct pupils into the expectations and normal ways of working for their school. This is a great way to ensure year 7 starts off on the right foot, but it counts for little if what they are inducted into is not the reality when the rest of the pupils arrive.
Whatever lines you lay down with year 7 must be held for the other year groups as well. If the new year 7 see that the other year groups do not follow the same rules that they are being asked to follow, it will lead to confusion about what the expectations are and make the transition from their well-ordered routines at primary school much more difficult.
