Primary to secondary transition: what matters to students most?

Jake, Max and Chrystal are approaching the end of Year 7, and they have some encouraging words for those following in their footsteps in September.

“You’ll make new friends,” says Jake. “On the first day of school, you’ll get in your form class, then you’ll greet them and ask, ‘What primary school did you go to?’ and slowly, you’ll become friends.” 

Max’s statement is short but sweet: “The food is better. The cooks are better.” And Chrystal adds: “There’s going to be one teacher that you’re really close to and you’re going to be able to speak to them about things like if you’re having problems at home.”

Bob, Joe and Saffa, however, have words of warning.

 “Don’t say silly things to older students,” advises Bob, while Joe says: “Remember different teachers’ personalities - whether they’re strict or chill.” Saffa adds: “Don’t answer back to teachers in secondary as you’ll get detention straightaway.”

The leap from primary to secondary can be daunting for pupils and researchers at University College London (UCL) want to alleviate some of the fear around transition, with the help of those, like Jake and his peers, who have experienced the transition for themselves.  

Eleanore Hargreaves is a professor of learning and pedagogy at UCL, and she leads the Children’s Life-histories In Primary Schools research project, which followed 23 children from Year 3 to the end of Year 7 and interviewed each child at the end of each term. The purpose, she says, was to find out from the children what it really means to attend school.

“In general, people - especially policymakers - don’t find out what the actual experience of the children is,” she explains. “Our research isn’t about statistics, it’s about vivid pictures of these children and their experience of school.”

As the pupils reached Year 6, anxiety about life after primary school heightened, she says.

“We didn’t particularly intend to focus on transition but it’s become clear that it’s a very, very big moment in their lives,” says Hargreaves.

“They were scared about punishments, strict teachers and not making friends. Obviously, every child had different experiences but, overall, there was a lot of fear.”

The research team has analysed the concerns Year 6s expressed, and the advice Jake and his peers shared at the end of Year 7, and concluded that pupils need three things when transitioning to secondary school: a sense of competence, a sense of agency and a sense of relatedness to others.

These needs are reflected in other research, too. In 2021, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) looked at research studies in this area and found that schools faced a “trio of challenges” around transition: curriculum continuity, school routines and expectations and peer networks. 

It’s easy to see how curriculum continuity relates to pupils feeling competent, how school routines and expectations can affect agency, and how the strength of peer networks helps children to feel related to one another.

More:

• Listen: The four barriers in the way of transition success
• How do we solve a problem like transition?
• Why the primary-secondary transition should be scrapped

So, what can schools and teachers do to ensure all three needs are being met in Year 6, as pupils get ready to leave, and in Year 7, when they arrive?

A sense of competence 

Kirsten Mould is a secondary school special educational needs and disabilities coordinator and a learning behaviour specialist at the EEF, with experience in key stages 2 and 3.

She says that building competence in pupils begins with an ongoing dialogue between primary and secondary schools. “There needs to be curriculum continuity discussions, where people are able to meet together and talk about how their subjects will look going right the way through,” she adds.

Often, it can feel that it’s up to the primary school to reach out and ask their secondary colleagues for insights into what they should be preparing Year 6 for. But, actually, Mould stresses, there is much that secondary schools can do, too.

At her own school, Mary Webb School and Science College in Shropshire, Year 7 English staff go to Year 6 writing moderation sessions to see the standards of writing, for example.

“You often hear the phrase ‘secondary ready’, but this requires both primary and secondary teachers to work together. It’s about making Year 7 teachers aware of the pupils’ skills and  competencies as well as the curriculum expectations they’ve come from,” she says.

“That’s challenging because you’ll need to reach out to a lot of different primary schools, but it doesn’t mean those conversations can’t happen. We take our staff on visits to primary schools to see Year 6s in action; that’s really powerful.”

Aidan Severs is an education consultant with decades of teaching experience, especially around transition, and he agrees that primary and secondary teachers have a joint responsibility to ensure  the curriculum flows from Year 6 to Year 7.  

“It comes down to prolonged communication. Primary teachers need to find out what is going to be the most useful curriculum content to teach in readiness for secondary. And once pupils arrive in secondary schools, teachers look to emulate best practice from primary schools - like topic work which builds links between subjects.”

For example, when working in an all-through school, Severs and other secondary department heads collaborated to deliver lessons around similar themes. Subjects were still taught separately but they had curriculum links and relevance to others.

“We know that’s how we learn; we build schema, we make links. We can only really do that in school if those links are deliberately there in the first place,” he adds.

There are Covid practices that secondaries could continue with, which would aid transition, he adds. Assigning Year 7s a zone in the school, for example, ensures they don’t get too overwhelmed and concerned about where their next classroom is, or how to deal with older students at lunch or break times.

Mould agrees that helping students to get a handle on logistics can foster that sense of competence. Traditional transition days give students an invaluable insight into secondary school life - and open evenings ensure parents understand the new expectations, too.

“During open evenings, taking the time to explain the self-reflection routines they’ll use in secondary can be really powerful. We model an independent study table, so parents can set up one similar at home and encourage their child to do their homework on it,” she says.

Her school also puts on different after-school STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths) clubs from the November of Year 6, so that pupils in the local area can get to know the building, the staff and other pupils.

A sense of agency

Ensuring children have a sense of agency in Year 7 can be tough to get right. At primary school, children are given a range of roles, from milk monitor to student council rep. When they get to Year 7, however, the tables turn: they become the youngest in the school.

At Mould’s school, staff trust Year 7s with an important task within the first three weeks: to write to their old primary school, offering a real account of their life at secondary school, giving advice to those who are in Year 6 - similar to the UCL project described above. 

In the spring, they have another task that particularly boosts their sense of agency: giving a tour of the school to their old Year 6 teachers. This gives them a chance to show off a bit, says Mould.

Despite the need to encourage agency, Severs says that Year 7s shouldn’t be expected to immediately adjust to new routines, expectations and systems, though.

“The focus shouldn’t be so much on logistical, systematic things. We can support them with all that, and make the learning the thing where we allow that autonomy most, and where we expect the highest things from them,” he says.

“I would rather have a child in my classroom who I’m really pushing to do a piece of work independently, who I also support for the next lesson to have the right equipment and to find the canteen. Too often, in the classroom, they’re redoing work they’ve already done and are hand-held through the curriculum.”

A sense of relatedness to others

Severs agrees that pupils being able to relate to their peers and the adults in their new school is a really important part of transition. But it’s tough to start this when the children are in Year 6, he says, as decisions around timetabling and form tutors often aren’t finalised until the end of the summer term.

However, schools can still help to create strong relationships by ensuring that there are a small number of teachers in each department who take on responsibility for teaching Year 7.

“These teachers should be Year 7 specialists and more on the nurturing end of the scale, to replicate the members of staff they will have experienced at primary,” he says.

In core subjects, with larger teams that are spread more thinly, teachers should ideally become Year 7 form tutors to ensure they become familiar faces for students.

When it comes to helping pupils form bonds with each other, Severs says that teachers should encourage working relationships.

“Working alongside other people is a great relationship builder and, a lot of the time, friendships come out of working collaboratively with others,” he says.

“However, teachers do need to be careful when it comes to group work. Often, those kinds of tasks can be too unstructured and unevenly weighted in terms of who actually does the work; that probably isn’t good for relationships because it can create tensions.”

Mould advocates creating a learning plan for each Year 6 pupil to ensure peer networks can be formed and encouraged. After Easter, she visits all the new pupils at their primary schools.

“We talk about their strengths and what they find tricky but, crucially, they tell me who they work well with, and what their interests outside of school are, and I put all of that into their plan,” she says.

Mould then uses these plans to organise form groups - and where there is just one child coming from a school, she matches them up with other children who have similar interests. These plans are shared with all staff during teacher training, either at the end of the summer term or start of September, to help to inform their knowledge of the new students.

Beyond the three needs identified by the UCL researchers, Severs and Mould agree on the key ingredient to easing transition for Year 6 pupils: time.

“Year 7 should be seen as a transition year: you should never think of a Year 7 child as being fully inducted until they’ve done the whole year - you really need to use that time to build relationships,” says Severs.

“It’s a process throughout Year 6 and Year 7,” adds Mould. “Schools really need to think about how they can build it at an early point. It’s not a top-down approach: there needs to be those real conversations between primary and secondary staff, whether it’s around curriculum or relationships.”

The strategies suggested by Mould and Severs may not work for every child in every school. But they do align with the comments of the people who went through this process most recently: the outgoing Year 7 cohort. And, as Hargreaves says above, too often, their views are ignored by policymakers and educators. Perhaps it’s time we started listening.