About 10 years ago I was sitting in a room with some primary teachers, secondary teachers and researchers when the idea of a “transition slump” came up.
We were running a focus group on literacy skills and literacy behaviour and were keen to get both primary and secondary perspectives. This was just before the introduction of the 2013 national curriculum, and “levels” (measures previously used in both primary and secondary to monitor progress) were on their way out.
In this focus group there was talk of a slump in literacy as pupils transitioned from primary to secondary school. Pupils were meeting targets well at the end of primary but not seeming to meet those same targets when they got to secondary.
When we talked this through, we wondered whether some of this slump could be explained by the assessment process; whether levels were being used and interpreted differently in primary and secondary contexts.
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This raised a couple of research questions. First, when consistent approaches to assessment are used at the end of primary and beginning of secondary do we see a decline in literacy attainment? Is there anything special about the summer holiday before transition, or does it resemble any other summer holiday? How does progress across the transition summer holiday compare with progress during the school year?
Transition and pupils’ literacy skills
A literature search didn’t reveal robust answers to these questions. So, to use a researcher’s favourite phrase, we knew we needed more research.
Fast-forward a decade and Dr Laura Shapiro, Dr Sanne van der Kleij and I have done this research, published in October 2022. We measured reading (and vocabulary knowledge) at several time points so that we could look at progress across primary-secondary transition and compare progress in this summer holiday period with progress during the first year of secondary school, and across the summer holiday between the first and second years of secondary.
What did we find? Well, reading skills and vocabulary knowledge were maintained or showed progress across the transition summer holiday. Also, progress looked the same as another summer holiday. So, no evidence for a transition slump.
Some interesting results emerged when we compared progress across the summer holiday to progress during the school year, though. Word reading and everyday vocabulary showed progress during the holiday and during the school year. Curriculum-related vocabulary and reading comprehension showed progress only during the school year.
One implication of this is that it matters how you measure vocabulary. We tend to think of vocabulary as a single entity, and of vocabulary knowledge as all or nothing. In fact, vocabulary knowledge is more complicated than this. We know lots of different kinds of words; we might know many different things about individual words.
Learning about words is a lifelong process of learning new words (breadth) and learning more about the words that we know (depth).
But back to the transition slump: what do our findings mean? Well, it looks like there is no reading (or vocabulary) slump. So why might we think that there is?
One hypothesis is that the demands of primary and secondary schools are dramatically different. In other words, a certain level of knowledge or skill might be sufficient in primary but not when faced with more challenging materials. This idea certainly resonates in my discussions with teachers. It also chimes with forthcoming research by Professor Alice Deignan and colleagues showing dramatic differences between the language of primary and that of secondary school.
But, of course, all of this comes with the standard caveat that more research is needed.
Professor Jessie Ricketts is director of the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA) Lab at Royal Holloway University
