Pupils in Transition

John Gardner, Professor Gill Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134686872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on the move from primary to secondary school, this book aims to help teachers and school managers to recognize and deal with the often traumatic effects that this transition has on young people's lives. The book: * explores the links between primary and secondary curricula * offers specific advice on how to meet the needs of children in transition * provides materials for investigating transition which will enable schools to identify the strengths and weaknesses in their approach.

Chapter 1

Introduction: principles and issues

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This chapter introduces the concept of transition on which the book is based. The focus is on the transition from primary to secondary school or, to put it another way, from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 where a change of school is involved. Three simple principles are identified: the importance of continuity and progression in teaching and learning; the need for primary and secondary schools to work closely together to deliver continuity and progression; and the need to recognize and ease the tensions and stresses which pupils can experience during the transition period. The majority of the chapter is given over to highlighting the issues that teachers and senior school managers on both sides of the transition must address.

Overview

In this introduction we provide an overview of the issues and set out the principles that govern good practice in managing transition. In one sense, the main transitions in a young person’s development revolve around physical change and the development of social experience. These are the stepping stones of growing up and are entirely natural and inevitable. Young people progress at different rates and their families and communities provide the stabilizing and comforting framework for the various changes that affect them. This natural change-process contrasts with the formal and very much contrived transitions imposed by the social system in which young people are educated. Major transitions here include beginning school, changing from primary to secondary schooling, and eventually graduation to employment. Schools are the focus of this book and one of its main aims is to help new and existing teachers to recognize and accommodate the sometimes traumatic effects that such transitions have on young people’s lives. A second aim is to examine how schools can best ensure fluent transitions, with a focus on transition from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3. It is widely accepted that this fluency should be underpinned by the continuity and progression designed into the curriculum, by the efficient and purposeful transfer of information at the interface and by comprehensive liaison between the various parties involved: teachers, pupils and parents.

In order to address the various issues we have adopted an approach which seeks first to identify matters concerning the main stakeholders: the pupils and their parents, the Year 6 teachers and the Year 7 teachers. Chapter 2 (‘Pupils and parents in transition’) therefore considers a pupil and parent perspective. Chapter 3 deals with the concepts and practicalities of ‘Curriculum continuity and progression’, while Chapter 4 focuses on ‘Continuity and progression in the core subjects’ (i.e. English, mathematics and science). Chapters 5 and 6 (‘Transfer of information’ and ‘Liaison between schools, teachers and parents’) respectively consider the various information requirements that exist and the mechanisms schools may use to increase the likelihood of success in transition. These chapters also deal with the elements of professional mistrust and even lack of respect which fuel what we have termed the ‘phase conflict’ between primary and secondary schooling. Much of this aspect of the work is drawn from the views of the many teachers with whom we have worked in a variety of research contexts.

The second aspect of our approach, making up Chapters 7 and 8, is to offer specific advice, illustrated by examples of good practice, on how the needs of children in transition may be met by teachers and schools. Chapter 7 (‘What is happening in your school?’) develops a ‘transition audit’, designed to enable schools to identify their strengths and weaknesses in their approach to transition. Chapter 8 (‘Collaborative networks for continuity’) takes this a step further to provide guidance on setting up the school networks and liaison processes that will govern a more system-wide exploitation of the continuity and progression, which the curriculum implies and indeed demands.

Principles

• Pupils should experience continuity and progression in their teaching and learning across the primary/secondary transition.
• Primary and secondary schools, associated by virtue of the transfer of pupils between them, should ensure that the necessary information transfer and liaison procedures are in place to ensure the continuity and progression in learning to which pupils are entitled.
• Primary and secondary schools should jointly recognize the difficulties and fears which pupils experience on changing schools and should work to lessen the impact of them.

These principles of curriculum continuity and progression and of professional collaboration across the transition ‘divide’ underpin the whole of this book. The issues giving rise to them, and arising from them, are not new. True, they are given more impetus by a curriculum that is designed to be seamless throughout the compulsory education age range and which seeks to enable children to learn, and be taught, at their own individual levels. The theory is idealized: a centralized curriculum, taught in differentiated fashion according to pupil needs, continuous across age and phase boundaries (e.g. primary and secondary) and assessed according to a standardized process. It is all so logical that the non-educationalist might just wonder what could possibly go wrong. Maybe it is not a case of going wrong, more a case of constantly seeking to reach the ideals— with a few hiccups and difficulties along the way. Sir Ron Dearing put it this way:

A concern often expressed during the recent review of the National Curriculum was that there was a loss of momentum in pupils’ progress between the end of Key Stage 2 and the beginning of Key Stage 3. Primary schools often felt that their achievements were not recognized and that secondary schools did not take sufficient account of the progress that pupils had made. Secondary schools, on the other hand, have to plan for pupils coming from a range of different primary schools and ensure that the curriculum in Year 7 builds on what may be a wide range of experience. This is not a new problem, and we need to make progress towards its solution. 6

(SCAA 1996)

Dearing focused on the central problem: the discontinuity in the progress children make as a result, essentially, of changing schools. He proposed some underlying reasons: lack of recognition of primary work by secondary schools and the often wide range of incoming pupils’ experience which secondary schools, sometimes with large numbers of feeder primary schools, have to accommodate. These issues in themselves hide deeper concerns and problems that we intend to draw out for scrutiny. For example it will be interesting to explore why some (or is it many?) primary schools might feel their achievements are not recognized. Might it be because they are looked down upon by their bigger cousins? Or might it more simply be that some secondary schools do not actually disseminate the transfer of information to the Year 7 teachers? Whatever the case, we intend to assess the perceptions of both the Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 teachers and then to propose ways of dealing with any divergence or lack of consensus between the sectors.

Pupils and parents in transition

Issues

• Which school will we choose?
• How will ‘big school’ be different?

These opening questions summarize the issues confronting pupils and their parents as they face a change in schools. The central issue for parents is to find the best school for their children. Once it has been chosen, and the pupils have been accepted, they and their parents then have expectations and perhaps doubts and worries associated with the prospective new environment.

We cannot avoid starting with the pupils. The children are the focus of all of these developments and their perception of the Key Stage 2/3 transition is very different from that of their teachers who manage the change routinely every year. ‘Going to “big school”’ is a major event for pupils and indeed their parents. The rigmarole of choosing the school, or in an increasing number of cases undergoing a selection process for particular schools, is becoming more complex and stressful. As funding becomes increasingly tied to pupil numbers, schools are marketing themselves much more aggressively than ever before. Glossy brochures, open days and even ‘special offers’ of free items of school uniform or stationery are all trotted out in attempt to counter falling rolls or simply to compete with the school ‘up the road’.

Caught up in all of this are the pupils, pushed by peer pressure to go ‘where my pals are going’ or by pressure from mum and dad to go to the school of their choice. Somehow the decision is made and the big day comes; they arrive at ‘big school’. No longer the big boys and girls of their previous schools they find themselves in a relatively noisy world of hustle and bustle where everyone is bigger than them! The static classroom of yesterday is often replaced by a trek around a variety of rooms during the school day. The sense of isolation is intense as the sheer size of the school separates them from the familiar faces that might have come with them from their previous school. And the teachers! Instead of one teacher for almost everything, they find they have anything up to a dozen or more: perhaps a dozen different teaching styles, a dozen different personalities and even a dozen sets of classroom rules. For the first couple of weeks, they experience a whirlwind of change and unfamiliar practices until at last the main patterns of ‘big school’ life take shape and meaning and they settle into the compartmentalized curriculum of the secondary school.

They all survive of course …all of us who have been through the system know that. Today’s schools are much more alert and ready to reduce the tension—and in some cases fear—that incoming pupils are apt to experience. Indeed many schools seek to exploit the awe and excitement that the pupils have by making the first few days special. Various events involving sports and group activities are provided to make a positive first impression. The secondary schools will often stagger the first day back for older pupils to enable the young ones to settle in without the added dimension of lots of larger, perhaps noisier and certainly at some level intimidating older pupils being around.

Curriculum continuity and progression

Issues

• Which school will we choose?
• What prevents continuity?
• What does a ‘fresh start’ mean?
• What is progression?
• How may continuity and progression be ensured in the core subjects?
• Teachers’ perceptions of KS2 and 3 continuity
• Pupils’ perceptions of subject continuity

Continuity and progression are uncompromisingly twinned in the National Curriculum. A central aim of the design is the progressive learning of children, a continuous building up of achievement and understanding limited only by the pupil’s own capacity to learn. Such progression needs a curriculum which is operationally continuous and which allows children to position themselves, and be positioned by their teachers, according to the level of their own learning development. The programmes of study underpin this objective by detailing the learning experiences and content that every child is entitled to during each Key Stage of their schooling. Although a very blunt measurement device, the eight-level assessment scale provides a basis for reporting progress within these programmes of study. It is designed to make assessment information meaningful and amenable to education experts (teachers etc.) and non-educationalists (pupils, parents etc.) alike. Chapters 3 and 4 take these concepts of continuity and progression and consider how the theoretical design can be realized in the reality of today’s schooling.

While few doubt the benefits of a continuous and progressive curriculum design, the argument that a change of schooling is a major and necessary transition, which is not unduly undermined by a discontinuity in experience, would certainly also find its supporters. Proponents of this view would argue that we should not underestimate children’s adaptability and the importance of fostering such adaptability for later life. In so much as children are known to adapt quickly to changes in teaching and learning styles, without any detriment to their ultimate progress, the proponents of this view argue that a little discontinuity at the start of a major phase in children’s education could even be beneficial.

Such a view, of course, does not deny that the continuity of the curriculum is re-engaged when the children have finally adapted and the school is fully addressing the Key Stage 3 agenda. On balance, most teachers and theorists would argue that continuity is a desirable ideal both from a teaching viewpoint (facilitating children’s learning from where they are rather than from some arbitrary curriculum point) and most importantly from a pupil’s perspective. Therein lies the rub of course. How does a Year 7 teacher manage to identify where to ‘start’ at a class and individual pupil level? Our experience would indicate that the latter issue—dealing with individual rather than class learning needs—lies at the heart of the matter. Once the levels of achievement of their pupils are known to the Year 7 teacher, supporting their progression properly will rely heavily on the teacher’s competence in differentiated teaching.

Generally speaking, Year 7 teachers receive groups of young strangers that for the most part do not know each other and indeed might be coming from qualitatively different educational and perhaps social backgrounds. In attempts to make classes homogeneous in ability, many secondary schools use standardized tests to stream or band their first form intake; and many of course do not. Ability is, however, only part of the story. Differences in levels of attainment are likely to have less to do with their ability than with the nature and quality of their primary schooling. For the Year 7 teachers the notion of a ‘fresh start’ is therefore an attractive way forward that enables them to keep their own teaching fluent—to the detriment, perhaps, of any semblance of continuity for many of their individual charges. Yet, as we will show in Chapters 3 and 4, even this concept of fresh start has a number of qualitatively different interpretations, some of which arise from the nature of the subject concerned. This issue will be illustrated by the core subjects English, mathematics and science, which as a group offer several distinct variants.

The existence of mistrust or lack of respect for one another’s judgement is a major factor in promoting discontinuity in the transition from primary school to secondary school. For the most part it is the secondary teachers, primarily in Year 7, that are perceived to ignore or disparage Year 6 work. For some years, in some quarters, there has been a perception of lower standards in primary schools, in the sense, for example, of the interpretation of a Level 5 performance in a primary school being at variance with the perception of a Level 5 performance in a secondary school. The settling in of the twin axes of teacher assessments for the process-based attainment targets in English, mathematics and science and the external assessments for the ‘product’- attainment targets may well see this divergence recede. However, the underlying professional mistrust may linger in other ways unless liaison on continuity and transfer begins to erode this ‘phase conflict’ also.

While some of the problems will be based on ill-informed or unprofessional attitudes among secondary teachers towards the quality of primary school work, there are also some relatively objective issues. Perhaps the most obvious example is the case of science where academic arguments still continue about the extent to which Key Stage 2 should be given over to the study of science. At the heart of this issue, is the perception of a lack of resources and a concern about the competence in a specialist area that a generalist primary teacher can bring to bear on the Key Stage 2 science requirements.

Primary school resources for science are unlikely ever to reach the quality and scale of those available to secondary schools (laboratories, dedicated technical support etc.) and in terms of staff competence, the current system of teacher training is unlikely to shift significantly towards specialist degree training for primary teachers. The nature of the primary curriculum and its delivery (i.e. the common model of one teacher per class) cannot demand the level of expertise in any subject area that specialist teaching in the secondary sector demands and expects. Add to this the very real differences between trying to provide a science practical lesson for a large primary class, compared to doing it with a relatively small secondary science group, and the causes for concern among science teachers become understandable.

Despite the strides being made in ensuring continuity in curriculum design, secondary teaching therefore remains very different from primary teaching. The pedagogic techniques themselves may be experiencing a growing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: principles and issues
• 2 Pupils and parents in transition
• 3 Curriculum continuity and progression
• 4 Continuity and progression in the core subjects
• 5 Transfer of information
• 6 Liaison between schools, teachers and parents
• 7 What is happening in your school?
• 8 Collaborative networks for continuity
• Bibliography
• Index