I have been thinking a lot recently about transition from primary to secondary. Much of the work around transition is thoughtful and well intentioned. Schools share vital information about pupils: there are careful conversations about SEND, safeguarding, attendance and pastoral needs, alongside induction days and efforts to make September feel welcoming.
All of that matters, but there’s another question that seems to receive far less attention:
‘What are pupils actually bringing with them from the curriculum?’
Not just what level they have reached, their reading age, or whether they are working at the expected standard, but what they have read, discussed, and encountered. What vocabulary have they begun to use, what disciplinary habits have they developed, and what have they already shown they are capable of?
I was reflecting on this during a recent session with primary colleagues working with The Teachers’ Collection. One school described how they had deliberately placed challenging, high-quality texts at the centre of the wider curriculum, starting in science, history and geography before extending into art and music.
These books weren’t decorative additions or topic wallpaper; the learning stemmed directly from them. Teachers read aloud while pupils listened, noticed, and questioned. The school collected those questions as Curiosity Sparks, turning them into springboards for vocabulary work, rich discussion, and independent inquiry. These pupils are encountering demanding literature, grappling with substantive disciplinary knowledge, and learning that genuine curiosity is central to academic work across every subject.
So what happens when those pupils arrive in Year 7? Unless secondary colleagues know what pupils have already experienced, it is remarkably easy to underestimate them.
Too often, Year 7 becomes an inadvertent reset point.
There’s a tendency to simplify texts, recap concepts children already know, and spend weeks diagnosing whether they can do things their primary teachers know they mastered long ago. Gradually, the unspoken message pupils receive is that the intellectual work they did before does not quite count here. Nobody intends this; it happens because our transition systems have traditionally been designed to transfer administrative data rather than curriculum depth.
Curriculum transition needs to become much more intentional, and that doesn’t require enormous transfer documents or another spreadsheet. It requires professional curiosity. It means secondary colleagues looking at primary curriculum plans, heads of department visiting Year 5 and Year 6 classrooms, and teachers examining the actual texts and work pupils are exploring. It means asking primary colleagues where the sophistication lies, what pupils have wrestled with, and where we might be making them start again unnecessarily.
The reverse matters just as much. Primary colleagues benefit from understanding where the curriculum is heading. Transition does not mean turning Year 6 into Year 7, because primary education has its own integrity and purpose. But knowing what comes next helps teachers understand which foundational ideas will travel, deepen, and branch into distinct disciplines. The aim is progression rather than continuity for its own sake. Year 7 should feel different, with new demands and greater depth, but that difference should build on what came before rather than returning to the beginning.
When we underestimate what pupils have already encountered, we do not merely waste time: we lower the intellectual temperature. A child who has discussed demanding literature, wrestled with historical questions, and had their curiosity taken seriously should not encounter a diet of simplified tasks simply because they have changed buildings. That is not transition; it is interruption.
The curriculum is one of the most powerful forms of entitlement we have, which means transition work is not peripheral to curriculum thinking. It is curriculum thinking. Perhaps the most productive transition question we can ask is not what data we need on these pupils, but what they have already been invited to know and think about, and what we are going to do with that next.
Until next time
Mary
PS If this has prompted some thinking about transition and what we ask of pupils when they arrive in Year 7, there’s more in KS3: The Ambitious Years.
This is such a wonderful talk in just a few minutes, you cover almost everything about purpose of curriculum and how to deal with it. I must say it is all factual, Dr. Mary. I refreshed my understanding on how learning proceeds and develops from one phase to another with a purpose and holds the importance and integrity as much as it belongs to a specific phase so does it connects to the next phase. Responsibility is ours how we work around it in the best interest of all learners and teachers. True that data matters; its use matters. Not just as a display on the excels and software but the effective use of it in teaching and learning as part of planning and reflection.