In the schools White Paper, former education secretary Bridget Phillipson condemned rising disengagement in schools, pledging to remove barriers that lead pupils to withdraw from education.
A negative experience of transition between primary and secondary school may be one such barrier. Studies have found that students’ enjoyment and engagement decline substantially during their first year of secondary school.
Some research has also found that missing school during this time is far more damaging to attainment than missing school in primary.
So, could improving transition be the answer to rising disengagement?
For a , mental health charity Anna Freud set out to understand students’ experiences of transition, to see what helped them and what made their experiences worse.
What do students find most difficult about transition?
Anna Freud spoke to 49 Year 8 students from seven secondary schools across England (six mainstream, one special). They reported finding transition both emotionally and socially challenging, and it was common for them to say they felt lonely, socially isolated and uncertain.
The students were nervous about making new friends, especially as their existing friendships may have been disrupted by transition. They were often scared of being judged or left out, and these feelings made them feel anxious and isolated.
Adjusting socially is not an extraneous challenge of transition but a fundamental aspect of it, the authors of the report suggest.
Changes in groupings made during the course of the school year were particularly difficult for students, says lead author Roisin McEvoy, who was head of training and national programmes at Anna Freud, because they often disrupted the start of students beginning to form friendships and relationships with their teachers.
A school may need to make changes to sets or classes for academic reasons, she acknowledges, but it should consider the impact on the wellbeing of students and how it will affect transition.
Students said they often required support with the increasing expectations of independence at secondary school, and struggled at first to manage their timetables, equipment and homework all by themselves. Many also said the size of secondary school and the process of navigating it was overwhelming for them, leaving them worried about making mistakes or being late and facing punishment as a result.
Many of them found a difficult tension between being expected to be more independent but not being given enough opportunities for autonomy.
Policies that restricted when students could use the toilet or how they could move around the school were highlighted as potentially undermining wellbeing and engagement.
“I was so scared that if I drank water at a certain time, I would just need to go to the toilet, then I’d be told off and wouldn’t be able to go to it,” one student in Year 7 reported. “So I didn’t drink and then when it was OK to drink, I didn’t feel thirsty at the time. So then I hadn’t drunk in a while and then I just got really lightheaded...and fainted.”
Finding a balance between offering students autonomy and ensuring that school runs smoothly can be a challenge, but it’s important to get this right, McEvoy suggests.
“We want our children to be able to make good choices, but we all learn to make good choices by getting practice at making choices. Also, having agency is really essential to our mental health,” she explains.
“In some schools, they’ve decided to shorten lunch and break time. They’ve decided to take away lockers. I know there are often really good reasons for doing these things, but those sort of less adult-mediated environments are really important sites of young person agency and choice.”
Students also said they were particularly frustrated by not being believed or trusted at school, or when they felt behaviour consequences were inconsistent or unfair.
What support did they find helpful?
However, there were some school practices that students reported made transition easier.
“Over the years, I’ve seen schools, and particularly pastoral leaders in schools, get a huge amount of this right,” McEvoy says.
One of the most important protective factors for a good transition that the Year 8 students mentioned was developing relationships with their teachers and other staff, particularly where they felt teachers were approachable, took the time to listen to their concerns and responded supportively.
Given the importance of making friends, school clubs and extracurricular activities were highlighted as very important for the students as opportunities to connect with peers.
“One of the wonderful things a secondary school can offer is that much wider group of people that you can make friends with and get to know and find your people,” McEvoy says. “Creating those multiple opportunities for children to meet others in a social context is important.”
“One of the strongest messages we got from talking to the young people was that this took at least the whole year,” she adds.
Most of the students interviewed said they gradually became more familiar with routines and their environment, and their move became easier over the course of Year 7, as they started to feel more in control and connected.
Students attending special schools who participated in the research said their school taking a tailored approach was the most helpful factor for them when transitioning.
“In the induction day, they asked us, ‘What would you like from us?’ and everything, and, ‘How would you like to help us, and how would you like us to help you?’” one student said. “And after a few weeks, they asked, ‘If you ever do get dysregulated or upset, who would you like to speak to? Who’s your favourite teacher that you’d like to speak to?’”
How can schools help?
So, what can all schools do to make transition as easy as possible for students?
Anna Freud makes several practical recommendations:
- Extend transition support throughout Year 7.
- Review policies that may unnecessarily restrict autonomy.
- Treat the forming of friendships as a key aim of Year 7.
- Provide extracurricular activities accessible to all students, as well as structured opportunities for social connection through things like peer mentoring.
- Provide opportunities both before and after transition for new students to explore the school when other students aren’t there, as well as reviewing areas of the school that may be overwhelming or stressful.
- Support student-staff relationships via stable tutor groups where possible, and having staff in Year 7 tutor teams who have enough pastoral experience.
- Get staff in from feeder primaries to look at your policies.
- Check in with students regularly on how well they understand the routine of the day and the expectations on them, and create opportunities for them to feed back on what they still need help with.
- Help students to develop independence by offering support where needed and perhaps even explicitly teaching organisational skills.
How should government help?
However, the task of reducing disengagement does not sit with schools alone, the report’s authors suggest.
Sir Keir Starmer’s government pledged to publish a pupil engagement framework later this year as part of its schools White Paper. We’ve since had a change in prime minister and a new education secretary, but Vlog understands that the framework will be published before the end of this academic year in an attempt to allow schools to use it for next September planning.
Anna Freud is recommending that the framework includes “meaningful health and wellbeing measures”. The transition to secondary should be positioned in policy as a critical period for wellbeing, belonging and engagement that needs support throughout the year rather than just at the start, the authors say.
A good-practice guide to starting secondary school would help with this, they advise.
Objectives stated in the White Paper are generally in line with this, McEvoy says. “For us, there seems to be something about really foregrounding the start of secondary school as being crucial to achieving the objectives, and that’s what we’d like to see in policy - a strong statement of both expectation and support for schools around doing this well.”
