Supporting a smooth transition

Coatholm Nursery School works in partnership with St Mary's Primary to communicate a sense of the ‘big school’ as a hospitable learning environment, one in which the learning skills which children already possess usefully enable next steps in learning.

The move to the ‘big school’ is an exciting and important time for children and their parents. Children look forward to it and mums and dads can see it as marking a significant moment when a special carefree time of childhood is left behind and children embark on a new phase of development.

The first days and months in primary school present so many new experiences and challenges, and children often respond with an accelerated spurt of development, thriving on the challenge and adapting well. This kind of response depends on the resilience of the individual child as well as on factors such as the network of friends and supporters that children can draw on. Research shows that how well children adjust to the challenges of the new environment can have a significant and lasting impact on their learning in school.

At Coatholm Nursery School we’ve been looking this year at ways of improving the quality of the transition experiences of children. As well as working with our primary partners, sharing information and supporting children and parents through well established induction programmes, we have become increasingly aware that our transition planning needs to address the ‘culture change’ that children experience as they move from one learning environment to another. Borrowing from Margaret Carr, our aim has been to develop an approach that makes it more likely that children moving on are ready, willing and able to confidently pick up the threads of successful early learning.

'Like a fish in water'

In thinking about what transition means for learners we focused on three things:

• we wanted children and staff to see that learning habits and dispositions developed in nursery – things like playfulness, independence, collaboration, spontaneity and perseverance – would serve their learning just as well in the new school
• we wanted children to develop positive perceptions of school, to see it as the kind of place where they could learn important things and where their status as accomplished learners would be acknowledged and valued
• we wanted children to have the knowledge and skills needed to operate successfully in the new learning environment.

In regard to the last of these we recognised that in the past a good deal of attention has been given to the academic knowledge and skills which children need in order to be ready for school. We were more concerned that children should have the everyday knowledge and skills needed to feel at home – to begin to feel ‘like a fish in water’. This included practical knowledge about toilets and eating places, as well as awareness of the accepted social mores of the school – what do you do when you don’t know what to do?

With all this in mind, our transition planning this year has had three strands:

• a calendar of transition activities
• building on established skills
• providing continuity by having P1 pupils return to the nursery on a weekly basis.

Transition calendar

With a primary school partner (St Mary’s Primary School, Coatbridge) we developed a transition calendar: a straightforward timetable of transition activities beginning in August and running through the year, with an activity pencilled in for most months.

Planned activities ranged from nursery staff working alongside primary colleagues in the first days of the new school year, to shared workshops, sports days, and visits from storytellers. The calendar also included planned times for staff to get together to look at transition reports and to review the progress of children in their first year. The emphasis was on familiarity, allowing children to begin to explore and find out about their new school long before making the move.

As well as allowing children to start to form important relationships, the activities naturally provided contexts for conversations and reflection between children, staff and parents. Just as importantly, the activities provided opportunities for staff to get to know each other better and to begin to think and talk together about the implications for teaching and learning of the ‘early level’ in Curriculum for Excellence, which is now beginning to be defined.

Building on established skills

Strand Two looked at literacy learning in the context of purposeful play. From the start of the new session Gillian Cairns, an early years worker from the nursery, worked alongside Tracy Hill, a Primary 1 teacher, developing storytelling as part of planned learning through play.

Weekly visits to the primary school allowed Gillian, a loved and trusted friend from the nursery, to support children in building on established skills – using puppets, masks and other props to explore familiar stories in role play. Children’s developing skill in reading lets them take on new roles compared to those adopted in nursery, but within a familiar and secure learning milieu.

When children from nursery began to join in the sessions, they too discovered that the playful approaches to literacy learning that worked well in nursery were valuable and valued in the new context. They were able to bring something special too - see for example the photograph opposite of the pre-school girl dressed as a princess (eventually) joining the story group and adding a different and unexpected dimension to the experience of the others.

Learning together, Primary 1 and nursery children successfully communicate a sense of the ‘big school’ as a hospitable learning environment, one in which the learning skills which children already possess usefully enable next steps in learning.

Sharing learning

Transition doesn’t start or finish at the point where children are handed over to a new school.

 The third strand involved small groups of children returning to the nursery on a weekly basis throughout their first year in primary. The purpose of this was twofold at least. We wanted to provide a degree of continuity and coherence for children who had just made the move to primary, allowing them opportunities to make links between learning experiences. We also wanted the children who would be making the move in the following August to have a whole year working alongside peers who, having already negotiated the transition, could return and ‘showcase’ their new learning and developing learning skills.

Watching children read and count together, we notice the levels of involvement, the attention and concentration, and the pleasure that both groups of children seem to find in the experience of sharing learning in this way.

Today we are still very much at the start of developing our approach to transition. So far the indications are that each of the strands has the potential to make a difference to children’s experience of transition. Looking to the future, we’re thinking about sustainability, about how we make sure that change is maintained and built on, and about extending the dialogue about learning and teaching in the light of Curriculum for Excellence.

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