We talk a great deal about seeing education from a child’s point of view and listening to pupils’ voices. Many of us spend a great deal of time considering the ways that we might bring the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to life in our schools; the Scottish government has committed to that convention’s incorporation into law. Yet so much of the way that the school system is structured remains redolent of the age when children may have been seen but were rarely heard - and were often hit.

Nothing in the following comments is intended to reflect anything but the deepest admiration, respect and gratitude to colleagues in primary and high schools for the work that is done to make the transition between P7 and S1 a successful and supportive experience for most pupils. But if we were designing a school system today, would we still organise a massive upheaval at the age of 12? Would we put children and their families through an educational, emotional and logistical wringer just at the time when so much else is starting to become stressful and strange in young lives?

We can rationalise why we make the break between primary and secondary school at that stage, of course. Yes, by S1 it is time for pupils to experience more specialist teaching, which is easier to provide in a bigger setting. Yes, there is a shift in pedagogy and opportunities for specialist guidance. Yes, the social development of children in a larger school is also important. But I suspect that those are post-hoc justifications of a structure that is rooted in long-gone days when the state provided elementary education for all, but secondary education for only some.

The stress of transition that we are trying to mitigate for our pupils is actually baked into the assumptions of the structure because it’s based on a tradition of rationing educational aspiration. “This is the end of your childhood and the upper limit of your ambitions,” say the ghosts of the education system past. But the more disruption you put in a system, the more it is likely to disadvantage those whose lives are already disrupted in other ways.

Every school wants to be able to say that it knows its pupils. In the seven years that pupils spend in primary school, staff will see them change from being little older than toddlers, to their emergence as young adolescents. They will know their strengths and vulnerabilities and how they have responded to challenges, be they educational, emotional or social. Siblings will have been born, grandparents may have passed away, parents might have separated or formed new relationships. There will have been tears and hopefully much joy, too. And the school will have been there for them throughout. Even if not all staff stay around, the institutional understanding of who they are will be strong. All that has to be distilled into a record to be handed over to the senior school with the records of potentially hundreds of others.

As a secondary head, I sat with colleagues and struggled to decode transfer records of pupils from a wide variety of primary schools. Of course, you get to know your colleagues in feeder primary schools and overwhelmingly to trust the information they provide. But you can also feel swamped by the sheer volume of material to be taken on board and shared with year heads and others. How to do justice to the insight that primary colleagues give us? How to pick up where they have left off - not just for the most vulnerable, but for every child who has needs (in other words, every child)?

There have been a few - but too many - occasions when something has been lost in translation. It’s only when things start to fall apart for the child that the full significance of a piece of information becomes apparent.

Professor Divya Jindal-Snape’s recent essay in Tes Scotland (“Are we getting lost in transition?”, 11 September) made a powerful case that schools should provide for “ongoing transitions”, focusing on the many ways that pupils transition as they grow through their school experience. So why do we persist in putting a “hard stop” in the middle of most children’s school careers? Surely it would be better to have a school system that did not assume that all pupils were ready to change setting, location, pedagogy, uniform, friendship group and relationships with staff all at the same time.

A consistent overall context

I have the huge privilege of leading a large school that has pupils as young as 4 and as old as 18. In one day, I might well have been wondering with a preschooler at the strange beauty of a beetle and later be teasing out the multiple meanings of poetry with an Advanced Higher English class. The shift requires some mental gymnastics, but the rewards are great.

Many of my teaching colleagues enjoy that kind of professional challenge on a regular basis, as we augment the classroom-based learning of younger pupils with specialists in, for example, physical education. We’re a school well known for our sporting tradition and it’s genuinely uplifting to see the same staff who coached a team to success on a Saturday working with equal enthusiasm and professionalism on balance skills with P1 the following Monday.

Around the world, the all-through school model is increasingly popular for international schools. Partly this is based on commercial efficiency. If you are going to have a nice swimming pool in your school, then having it constantly in use by 2,000 pupils in one school is better than having it half used by a school of 1,000 pupils. And in competitive markets for schools anywhere, enrolling children as young as decently possible and keeping them for as long as possible makes good business sense.

Parents, too, want to sign up to something for the long term. If an international posting is going to be shorter than their children’s school career, but cut across the local transition point between primary and secondary, the through-school model takes the anxiety away, as it does if there are siblings in several different year groups.

But do all-through schools work for children? Is there any sense that pupils miss out from the lack of a move to “big school” with all that it implies about maturity and, hopefully, responsibility and increased confidence?

It isn’t as though there are no transitions in an all-through school like mine. Our primary school and senior school still operate as distinct entities, each with their own focus, expertise, core staff and facilities. But we have the luxury of being able to use the journey of the pupil as the main organising principle of the school. Transitions happen and are managed, not just between primary and senior school, but at many points along that journey.

Change is natural in every child’s school experience, but in an all-through school, that change happens within a consistent overall context. As a pupil, you go through school with a group of peers that will probably grow in number as you yourself grow in stature and maturity. Those new classmates will bring with them new social dynamics and opportunities for friendship. Staff will change around you. You will change locations, you may use different entrances and facilities. The challenges and opportunities of your schooling will evolve along the way. You may sometimes find yourself working with pupils much older or younger than yourself. You’ll probably enjoy being the role model for the youngsters just as you liked showing off your work to older pupils when you were their age. Some elements of your uniform will change, but others will stay the same.

By the time you finish school, your experience will, of course, be entirely different from when you started. But you will never have had to experience the dislocation of everything changing at the same time. And if you’re 17 and you want to pop back to see your P1 teacher after school one day, the chance is that he’s still there and will be pleased to see you. In fact, you may find yourself helping in your old class.

The danger in an all-through school is that it ends up being a half-hearted primary school swamped by an equally half-hearted senior school. I have certainly visited schools where the whole is considerably less than the sum of the parts and where many transitional issues are still evident. To be effective, the whole school must work together, its constituent parts complementing each other in every way.

Here, we don’t always get it right, but I think we’re aware of the pitfalls. The particular specialism of each member of staff must always be respected and nurtured, and there must be no sense that one form of pedagogy or practice is dominant. The things in a school that need to be age specific must be identified and provided for, but the rest can be shared, whether that is access to facilities, equipment, specialist teaching spaces, or the insight or expertise of particular teachers or support staff. My experience is that teachers become better teachers when they have to think things through from the perspective of age groups that they may not normally teach, but whose presence in school is a day-to-day reality.

Designing-out transition

There have been many attempts to soften the primary-to-secondary transition over the years. Sometimes that has taken the form of a three-stage approach along the model of the American junior high or middle schools that were a feature in many English local authorities until most were rendered impractical (or at least unaffordable) by the introduction of the national curriculum.

But I believe the best way to deal with the issue is to change its context entirely. Since we no longer live with a system that rations secondary education, we should, as soon as is practical, stop thinking of the transition of pupils from primary to secondary as a problem to be solved - we should instead design it out of the system altogether.

It would no doubt take many decades to achieve, even if we started today. But there are things we could do in the meantime. It would help if the General Teaching Council for Scotland allowed more flexibility between primary and secondary registration. With that might come more thought about what primary and secondary colleagues can learn from each other. Existing good practice in local clusters could form the basis for greater curriculum alignment, in particular between P5 and S3. And you do not actually have to be one school on a single site to use the journey of the pupil (and the pupil’s family) as the organising principle for that pupil’s education.

We are gradually getting used to the idea that all of our systems ought to have the needs of children and their rights at their centre. Embracing the potential of all-through schools could be a powerful sign that we are serious about putting that idea into practice.

Melvyn Roffe is principal of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh

This article originally appeared in the 6 November 2020 issue under the headline “A break with history”