What transition work actually looks like

Well hello there, and welcome to update #207!

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Last week I wrote about the risk of Year 7 becoming a reset point, and the question I think we should be asking at transition: what are pupils bringing with them, and what should we do with it next? This week I want to think about what that looks like in practice, based on some of the comments I received on LinkedIn.

One response: Go and look! One of the most striking things in the responses to that piece was how many people described the effect of secondary colleagues actually visiting primary classrooms. Heads of department went into Years 5 and 6. Science teachers saw the level of exploration and experimentation pupils were already experiencing. Secondary colleagues looked at primary books and curriculum plans. And assumptions changed. In one school, five heads of department visited feeder primaries as part of whole school professional development. The result was that Year 7 schemes of work changed. That is transition work. It wasn’t another form, or another data field, but professional curiosity about what pupils have already experienced, followed by curriculum decisions about what should happen next. And perhaps we should go younger still. One colleague made the point that secondary teachers should not only visit Years 5 and 6, but early years too. There is something powerful about seeing the level of curiosity, independence and intellectual engagement very young children are capable of. It becomes much harder to justify lowering expectations later.

Another response: Ask the pupils! Barbara Bleiman made an important observation: why do we spend so much time passing information about pupils and so little time asking pupils themselves what they are bringing with them? She suggested that an early Year 7 English task might ask pupils about a picture book they once loved, a novel, graphic novel, poem or song that mattered to them, a piece of writing they are proud of, what they hope to do in English and what they might be anxious about. Imagine what that would tell us. Not simply about attainment, but about intellectual history, about identity as a reader and writer, about confidence, about what pupils remember and what they care about. Perhaps transition should include more opportunities for pupils to tell us the story of their learning so far, because they do not arrive in September as blank pages.

A further response: Variation is real. Of course, pupils arrive from different schools having had different experiences. Some secondary schools receive pupils from dozens of primaries. Attainment varies, curriculum coverage varies, what has been remembered varies. So we cannot simply say they have done this in primary, therefore everyone knows it. But neither should variation become the justification for resetting everyone to the lowest common denominator. The answer lies in careful curriculum thinking: what should we preserve, what needs retrieving, what should become deeper, what can pupils now do with this knowledge that they could not do before? There is an important distinction here between retrieval and repetition. Pupils forget things. That does not mean we need to start again. Sometimes pupils need help reconnecting with previous knowledge so that it can be strengthened and used in a more sophisticated way. That is very different from simply giving them the same experience again.

Another observation: Transition should continue into Year 7. In one example, Year 6 teachers visited their former pupils in October. They looked at Year 7 work. And sometimes they said to secondary colleagues: you can ask more of this pupil. That is such a powerful sentence, because transition had not ended in July. The conversation continued once pupils were actually in their new setting. The primary teachers brought knowledge of the pupil, knowledge of the previous curriculum and knowledge of what that child had already been capable of. That combination allowed secondary colleagues to raise rather than lower expectations. It reminds us that transition is not simply about transferring information. It is about building shared professional understanding.

So, let’s keep the thread. The organisational boundary between Year 6 and Year 7 is real. The intellectual boundary need not be. Pupils arrive with books they have loved, ideas they have encountered, vocabulary they have acquired, things they can do, things they have forgotten and things they are proud of. Good transition begins by becoming curious about all of that, then asking: what do we preserve, what do we build, where do we need to retrieve rather than repeat? Cross-phase coherence does not begin with a transition document. It begins when teachers understand the intellectual journey of the subject beyond the part of it they personally teach. And when Year 7 is treated not as a fresh start, but as the next chapter.

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.