As a Head of Department in a large secondary school, transition is something that has always vexed me. To give some context, my school is in a multi-academy trust (MAT), although this is still ar relatively new endeavour. We are in a small MAT and are currently the only secondary school, alongside four local primaries. However, owing to the fact that we have an intake of 350 students per year group we have numerous feeder schools that span a few different towns in a wide geographical area, many of which are not in our MAT. Therefore, when time is so limited, I have grappled with how I can start to map transition between key stages 2 and 3 when there are so many primaries to work with. It has felt an insurmountable task.
In September, I started Year 1 of the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust Leadership Programme. The aim is to work with a mentor to identify the gaps in your experience and develop a project in order to plug these. I have always been interested in working more closely with primary colleagues in my area and so this presented the perfect opportunity to make transition the focus of my project so that I could finally put the necessary time and energy into it.
As a result, I am only just starting this work, and I am sharing some tips on how to get started, in light of what I have learnt so far.
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