Photo by Håkon Grimstad on Unsplash
I have been having quite a few conversations about transition recently. I don’t mean transition as an administrative event or the spreadsheet passed from one school to another, or the meeting in July where information is exchanged about pupils. What I mean is the intellectual transition from one phase of education to the next.
And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that one of the biggest risks at the end of Year 6 is that Year 7 becomes a reset point. Pupils arrive in secondary school having already spent seven years learning. They have read books, encountered ideas, built vocabulary, carried out investigations, written at length, made things, performed, argued, questioned and wondered. And yet secondary colleagues can sometimes be surprised by what pupils have already done.
The problem is that if we underestimate what pupils are bringing with them, we risk giving them less demanding work just at the point when we should be building on what they already know.