Part of understanding transitions in our school is coming to grips with the special character and the different ways that students, families and staff interpret this.

This term has been all about information gathering. By identifying contributing schools and other schools that operate ‘differently’, we are beginning to build a picture of what transitions can and have looked like.

A fascinating part of this information gathering has been interviews with individual students about the transitions they have had into and through the school. Their perspective is often different to ours, and the student moving from a primary environment into a secondary one can feel overwhelmed and puzzled. The strength of the Homebase system also comes through, with that relationship between students and their LA at the heart of what makes sense of the system and supports success.

This relationship grows as and if the students choose to stay, and one student expressed it as, “I want to stick with my LA because they are the person who knows you best and is best at working with you.”

Because student-driven material is key to our place, we’ve designed a course for next term that looks purely at the transition experience and asks students to develop induction handbooks that address the cracks that students can see, that teachers may not.