The transition period between primary and secondary school can be fraught with worry for pupils and teachers.
Navigating a new, larger building with myriad teachers and classes can leave new Year 7 pupils anxious - it can all feel very different to the consistent support of one teacher they are used to at primary school.
However, in one school in the Midlands, pupils’ worries have been eased somewhat through the novel idea of a “reunion” meeting with their former primary school teachers, complete with tea and cake.
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At Nuneaton Academy in Warwickshire, Year 7 pupils sent letters inviting former primary teachers for a “reunion” evening, where they showcased two or three pieces of work at their new school, as well as sharing tea and cake with their teachers and teaching assistants.
The transition from primary to secondary school
Heads have praised the “unusual social dimension” of the evening, and said that this could help to ease a “thorny area of transition”.
Claire Cooke, who leads the school’s academy trust on transition and post-16 education, said she had the idea after seeing how keen Year 7 pupils were to see former primary teachers on Year 5 transition days.
She, therefore, decided to run a tea event for the Year 7 cohort to reconnect with teachers from their feeder primary schools.
“The students selected who they wanted to send these letters [of invitation] to, and the people who they had found meaningful weren’t just the headteachers but also a teaching assistant,” she said.
“The conversations were just so warm - they were running up to them and hugging them in reception - we did not expect the reunion to be quite so emotional.
“From that perspective, you don’t realise at secondary school how close the relationship between pupil and teacher at primary is.”
Robin Shakespeare, the Midland Academies Trust’s school improvement lead, said the evening showed “that the journey to secondary is a gradual one, and it’s something that they don’t need to be worried or fearful about”.
“Sometimes it can be an artificial divide, primary versus secondary, and it helps to show they are not that different,” he said.
Ms Cooke added that the school is part of a deprived community, and that strong links between primaries and secondaries helped to show parents that the secondary system was not so different from primary.
“[Pupils] were ridiculously excited - all day they were buzzing that their teacher was coming to their school, to show that primary teacher they’d made a successful transition. They were immaculately turned out, they wanted to show off their school,” Ms Cooke added.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said the idea could be especially useful for monitoring pupils’ literacy.
‘It’s a really interesting, creative idea, because we know transition is one of the biggest issues for students continuing their momentum in a whole host of areas, particularly literacy,” he said.
“It’s very different at secondary, where you are carrying your books around with you all the time, and it’s useful for new teachers to see what the expectations of pupils were at primary. Anything that allows pupils to show off their work and feel proud of, that is excellent,” he said.
Indeed, some primary teachers were impressed by the quality of former pupils’ handwriting, which they did not think was a focus at secondary school.
“What’s unusual about this is the social dimension,” Mr Barton said.
“I haven’t heard of that being done before, but as a way of informing teachers to create a sense of continuity across schools, it’s probably a very good thing for both staff and pupils.
Mr Barton cautioned that schools could rarely take ideas “off the shelf” and replicate them exactly, but that it was always positive to champion “innovative” ideas.
“There will be people sneering about the time it would take and whether it gets to the heart of learning - but it can definitely be part of a whole holistic way of easing a thorny area of transition,” he said.
