Leadership
Plan an Effective Transition for Your Students
Plan a move from primary to secondary that keeps pupils making progress, from the first visits in Year 5 to settling into Year 7.
- 36 minutes
- 8 modules
- 0.5 CPD hours
- Certificate
Members
14 days free, then £70 a year or £7 a month.
Have a join code from your school?
Already have an account? Sign in
What you'll learn
- Audit your transition arrangements against the five transition bridges
- Plan a transition timeline that starts in Year 5, not the summer of Year 6
- Use bridging units, pupil passports and peer mentors to ease the move
- Run July transition days that reassure pupils without testing or overselling
- Judge success by how well pupils settle socially, into routines and in lessons
About this course
Almost four in ten children fail to make expected progress in the year after they change school. Year 7 repeats work they did in Year 6, they're retested weeks after SATs, and parents start to wonder why their child seems to be going backwards.
There are five places, or "bridges", where transition can be strengthened, from passing on records to helping pupils talk about their own learning. You get a model timeline that starts in Year 5. There are also ideas to take to your feeder schools: a transition champion in each department, bridging units started after SATs and finished in September, pupil passports, Year 8 peer mentors and a staggered start to the year.
Transition days in July get a hard look too. Testing pupils backfires, and so does a theme-park tour of the best bits, so you'll plan a day that sits between the two.
- For middle leaders and senior leaders. Post-16, primary, secondary and special.
8 modules
Open in order
- 5 min
Introduction
- 2 min
Wrap Up
- 3 min
Why does transition matter?
- 4 min
The 5 transition “bridges”
- 7 min
The features of an effective transition I
- 10 min
The features of an effective transition II
- 7 min
What does effective transition look like for pupils?
- 2 min
Making best use of transition days