Growing pains: The transition from primary to secondary

It seems that there is an element of 'snakes and ladders' about the transition from primary school to secondary school. While many pupils clearly make progress up the ladder of school life, there are some that slide down the achievement stakes as they merge into Key Stage 3.

Possible causes

Evidence from the National Foundation for Educational Research has shown that 40 per cent of pupils lose motivation and make no progress in the year after transfer to secondary school.

The precise reasons for this are unclear, although many of those directly involved in the crucial transition years report similar concerns. Communication difficulties, cultural differences between the primary and secondary 'styles' and insufficient attention to the emotions of changing schools crop up as possible causes time and again.

John Coe of the National Association for Primary Education feels that the situation regarding the transition of pupils between the primary and secondary phases of education is more difficult than perhaps it once was.

'In the past', he explains, 'there were more clearly defined partnerships between primary schools and secondary schools. But now of course, particularly in urban areas and out of city suburbs, children from one year 6 class can go to a wide variety of secondary schools so liaison smoothing transition can be very difficult.'

Diana Cochrane, a head of maths and representative from the Association of Teachers of Mathematics agrees:

'I have about 180-200 pupils in year 7 each year coming from around 28 different feeder schools. Parental choice over which school to send their children to has added to this situation. I receive a range of information about kids and this information arrives at different times. Sometimes I don't get anything about specific things that they can and can't do other than their key stage 2 levels. So, I have to allow for this and get to know the pupils for myself at the start of every year. We have to make sure that their understanding of the groundwork is solid and each child has to be treated as an individual.'

Smoothing the path

From the perspective of the secondary school, making as much information as possible available about children is crucial, but the pastoral differences between the primary and secondary systems is something that has to be kept in mind. For John Coe, the best answer to this is direct contact between the teachers of the children in primary school and the teachers who will receive them when they get to secondary school.

'Although we have the National Curriculum' John Coe says, 'not all children have learned the same things and know the same amount. Children vary enormously in how they have gone along the National Curriculum and in how they have understood it.'
John Coe feels that from the primary point of view, 'there really needs to be attention to the transmission of records which is surprisingly weak in some schools. Our association would want pupil records to be open to parents and we would want them freely shared. They should be sent to the receiving schools even if year 6 is going off to 10 or 11 schools. Each child should have their full record of progress during the primary stage sent ahead of them to the relevant school.'

It's not all one-way

Coe believes that, 'there is an equal responsibility on the part of the receiving school, the secondary school, to really take on board those records when they arrive. I'm afraid I've known schools in my experience too often to say things like 'we like to start with a clean sheet'. So the records get put to the back of the cupboard and maybe looked at during half term. This really is an unprofessional approach. The records should be studied, there should be discussions with the children in the receiving school, discussions with the parents and if necessary, their secondary school teacher(s) should make direct contact with the year 6 teacher who worked with that child at the other end of the summer holiday. As an Association we would wish to see the maximum personal contact between the teachers at each side of the divide.'

Facilitating secondary school teachers observing good practice in the primary phase, particularly in numeracy, literacy and science, has evidently helped teachers on both 'sides' to understand the way in with each other must work. For secondary teachers to have a sound understanding of what is expected of primary pupils and of what they are actually achieving in the primary classroom is paramount.

If actual visits aren't possible, John Coe believes that a portfolio of work can be just as effective. 'The children can take their best work - that's fine because the best targets for children are that they should be better than their previous best.'
So, in discussion with their class teacher primary leavers should gather together an example of their handwriting, their story writing, their numeracy skills, perhaps some project work and anything else that will flesh out this young being in terms of their academic knowledge and skills. 'This should all be studied by the receiving school in the light of the records, and should, I think, help the transition go with the maximum of ease.'

Settling in

Yet it's not just about information and academic achievement when it comes to nurturing a child through the transition from primary to secondary school. Harriet Goodman is the Education Director for Antidote, the Campaign for Emotional Literacy. In her experience, she hasn't yet come across a secondary school that hasn't been thinking hard about how to get their year 7s (or 8s, depending on the transition age) adjusted well.

Something that has become evident in Antidote's experience is the frequency with which year 7 classes struggle to find a sense of community and shared goals. Harriet Goodman told TeacherNet about an unusual model that Antidote is using with one particularly fragmented year 7 group, which involved taking them away from the school setting for a day and doing team-building exercises with them based around the question, 'how are we going to survive together'.

Harriet explains:

• 'In the afternoon, the group received feedback on their skills and then had a discussion on the difficulties they were having as a group particularly around gender. The drama teacher had mentioned that they laugh at each other and don't receive each others performances very well, and that broke down into boy/girl discussions.
• 'What was interesting for us about the day was that we resisted the teacher's understandable inclination to set targets for the group or to give them a solution to the problem, which of course you can't impose. Over time they began to work together and teachers began to see moments of empathy, community and collaborating which is very exciting.'

Being the youngest again

Another observation of Harriet's is that children at this transition age spend so much time together yet know very little about their fellow classmates. 'They hardly know anything about each other. There is lots of mystery about the others in their class, which is exciting but which can also cause a great deal of anxiety.'

In a way, Harriet feels, this is linked in to the emotions of transition. 'It can be very exciting to be looking forward to going up to big school. There are few families who don't make a thing of that, but there's also the anxiety of 'where am I going to go, is it going to be alright, I've been the top of the school and now I'm the baby again''.

Perhaps one way of tempering these anxieties is for the receiving schools to openly acknowledge that young people coming in have often taken significant responsibility and learned great skills in their primary schools. For example, their primary school may have had a peer mentoring or mediation scheme of some sort or other responsibilities that year 6 is given. It can be easy for these skills to drift unacknowledged in the secondary school when they join with a blank slate again. In some schools, this issue is circumnavigated by encouraging children to write up for each other, 'this is what I've done, this is who I am, this is where I come from, this is my family, this is what I'm interested in and this is what I'm proud of'. Pupils are then sure of their identity and through doing that create a group identity that they can then move forward with.

None of this in itself will remove the anxiety of being in a bigger group of learners and a larger institution, and beginning to face a harder edged curriculum that moves pupils towards formal qualifications, but then again, that's real life; those anxieties are there and it's not about removing them.

What it is about is building up resilience and collaborative skills that enable students to develop, and not ignoring the positive excitement of growing up and moving on. As Antidote believes, it would be very sad not to build on that.

Originally published on Teachernet