Go back to your childhood. What gave you feelings of safety when starting secondary school? Joining a new team? Moving house?

Viewing transition through both the lens of your professional knowledge along with your personal experience. This came through during a workshop with a room of primary practitioners, we asked them to go back to their childhood and think about what gave them a sense of safety when they started secondary school. It was interesting to hear in their reflections an understanding of the long-term impact of the transition from primary to secondary school, and what this meant for the way in which we prepare children to make this leap.

‘My family. I didn’t need to go to anyone for safety and connection at school because I got that from my mum. I still go to my mum for support now.’

On family as a source of safety

‘I don’t think children feel connected to anyone unless they have older siblings who’ve been at the school already. Everyone creates a sense of threat.’

On peer connection and threat

‘I played a lot of sports and I got connection and reward from being in teams.’

On belonging through sport

‘I think that those experiences in Year 7 stay with you, they shape who you become as an adult.’

On the long-term impact of Year 7

For adults too, transitions can be incredibly exciting but can also trigger crises that can be difficult to recover from. Transitions such as parenthood, starting or ending a job or relationship and retirement. Many people experience their first episode of major depression during the postpartum period. Retirement can boost mental health but for people on low incomes, there is often a fading honeymoon effect with a decline after two and a half years.

For children, those transitions are no different. Starting both primary and secondary school can be fraught with anxiety and worry. Typically, the focus of discussions about transition goes to the children starting secondary school. Structurally, it is the most significant transition as a universal experience but if we think of the definition more broadly as ‘the process or period of changing from one state or condition to another’, we are able to identify the many transitions children and young people encounter within education:

On the surface, these transitions may appear to be dissimilar and there might be a temptation to see them within different classes and with different levels of importance. However, they share certain crucial features which have the potential to cause anxiety which can lead to a sense of the loss of identity that can cause long-lasting harm:

DfE data shows that the sharpest rise in suspension rates is from age 4 and under to 5 years old and from 10 to 11 years old, the ages when children transition from Reception into Year 1 and from Year 6 to Year 7. These rates increase as children progress through secondary school, but casting a spotlight on transition could be a key to improving these outcomes. Although data consistently shows that years 9 and 10 often see the highest rates of both persistent absence and suspensions, how and when we attend to these rates matters. 

FFT Education Datalab recently published a blog that drew attention to the substantial change in numbers of pupils identified with SEN in the transition from Year 6 to Year 7. Around 19% of pupils met with SEN support in 2023/24 were no longer identified as having SEN when they started secondary school. Also, the majority of pupils with EHCPs who attended a resourced provision or SEN unit left mainstream education during that transition. This means that children not only risk falling off this cliff edge of support, but that this gap may well persist throughout their schooling, becoming increasingly invisible as the years progress. 

It would be very easy to see transitions as of secondary importance as transition does not feature heavily in the new frameworks and policies that schools are in the process of implementing. Under the new inspection framework, Ofsted inspectors now evaluate how well schools manage the transition of vulnerable learners (including those with SEND or those known to social care) into and out of the setting, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill mandates mental health support that remains consistent during school transitions and there is a renewed focus on transitions into adult life in the Schools White Paper. How transitions feature in these documents tells us something about the importance of continuity. There is something very important that can be gained by seeing transition not as an event but as a long-term process, one whose consequences may extend far beyond that period of time and play a role in some of the outcomes that we see.

The Difference and EdCity are collaborating on an interactive listening workshop that will explore the challenges surrounding transitions at all age ranges in our schools. We will be joined by a range of speakers to critically examine what is working and what perspective shifts need to occur in order to make sure that children do not fall into gaps. This will be used as a stimulus for further sessions exploring effective practice to better support young people. We look forward to sharing the knowledge and experiences of the participants with you.