A £500,000 fund has been launched to support schools in the North East help children to make the transition from primary to secondary school.

The fund is part of a  project by education charity SHINE that will explore why the region’s primary school results are stronger than the subsequent grades achieved in secondaries.

The charity will work with the regional schools network Schools North East to identify evidence-based work in schools that can be rolled out more widely.

Profile: SHINE’s CEO Fiona Spellman

Background: North should lead its own school transformation

Quick read: New programme to raise standards in North East announced

The North East education fund will see £500,000 spent over three years.

SHINE’s chief executive Fiona Spellman said: “The reason for creating this fund specifically is that we find the narrative for the North-South divide on education is particularly acute in the North East, where the data broadly shows primary schools doing pretty well. That is not continuing in secondary and we are trying to unpick why that is more.

“We are working in partnership with Schools North East who have the expertise in the region to identify school-led practice .”

The charity moved from London to a new base in Leeds in 2017 to focus solely on work in the North of England, where Ms Spellman said the biggest disadvantage gaps in pupil attainment were being found.

She said: “One of our main priorities now in the North of England is the primary to secondary transition years and finding ways of supporting more vulnerable children to make that transition more successful.

“That is often by supporting programmes where teachers across the divide share information, share practice share knowledge about the children but its also about providing extra support to children who would otherwise struggle to navigate that transition.”

She said this could include identifying and looking to support children with poor literacy and numeracy skills.

The project will also look at ways of improving school readiness in early years in the region.

The charity aims to raise life chances for children in the North of England.

Analysis of Sats results by the FFT Education Datalab earlier this year showed that the  “value-added” by North East schools from key stage one to two in primary school was greater than any region outside of London.

However, this does not continue into secondary, where value-added tables show that schools in the North East were the worst performing of the nine government regions.

Last year, Tes reported on the efforts to better support the transition from primary schools to secondary in the North East.

Vision Academy Learning Trust, which is based in the region, said it had boosted its English and maths results by using pupils’ former primary school teachers to monitor their performance when they start at secondary school.

The scheme sees Year 6 teachers and primary heads examine the work of year seven pupils twice during their first term at secondary school and produce a report on each pupil’s progress.