Target audience

• Directors, educational leadership
• School leaders
• Transition coordinators.

Purpose

This resource has been designed to support schools in strategically planning and evaluating continuity of learning practices to strengthen student learning outcomes when transitioning to high school.

When and how to use

This resource can be used by schools when evaluating their primary to high school transition initiatives, with a specific focus on supporting students from geographically distant and small schools. School leaders and transition coordinators may use this resource with key school staff and stakeholders within their school networks, including partner schools, and director, educational leadership to evaluate and strengthen current transition practices.

Evidence base

Evidence indicates that the relational trust between partner schools provides a platform for schools to build on and support each student’s continuity of learning as they transition from primary school to high school.

Further reading

1. Barker RG and Gump PV (1964) Big school, small school: High school size and student behavior, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA.
2. Caldwell BJ (2013) Research on school size: An Educational Transformations Briefing Paper (PDF 95.7 KB), Educational transformations.
3. Cotterell J (1992) ‘School size as a factor in adolescents’ adjustment to the transition to secondary school’, Journal of Early Adolescence, 12(1):28–45, doi.org/10.1177/027243169201200100.
4. Cotton K (1996) ‘School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance’, School Improvement Research Series (Close-up #20), Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, Office of Educational Research and Improvement U.S. Department of Education, accessed 17 May 2024.
5. Eacott S (2022) Small schools for equity and inclusion (PDF 2.7 MB), University of New South Wales.
6. Johnstone K (8–9 October 2001) ‘High hopes from small places’ [conference presentation], Australian Council for Educational Administration Annual Conference, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, accessed 21 May 2024.
7. Kahne JE, Sporte SE, de la Torre M and Easton JQ (2008) ‘Small High Schools on a Larger Scale: The Impact of School Conversions in Chicago’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 30(3):281–315. doi/10.3102/0162373708319184.

Alignment to the NSW Plan for Public Education

This resource is aligned to the following focus areas and actions within the NSW Plan for Public Education:

• advance equitable outcomes, opportunities, and experiences
  • develop targeted, differentiated, evidence-informed initiatives and supports
• deliver outstanding leadership, teaching, and learning
  • support schools to deliver school excellence through continuous improvement
  • improve how data is used to inform teaching
• strengthen student wellbeing and development
  • improve support for students at all transitions throughout schooling.

Alignment to the School Excellence Framework

The key themes that align to the School Excellence Framework (staff only) (version 3) include:

• transitions and continuity of learning
• curriculum provision
• whole school monitoring of student learning
• data literacy
• leading, teaching and learning.

Alignment to Australian Professional Standards for Teachers

This resource aligns to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers:

• 5.4.3 Work with colleagues to use data from internal and external student assessments for evaluating learning and teaching, identifying interventions, and modifying teaching practice.
• 5.4.4 Coordinate student performance and program evaluation using internal and external student assessment data to improve teaching practice.
• 6.3.3 Initiate and engage in professional discussions with colleagues in a range of forums to evaluate practice directed at improving professional knowledge and practice, and the educational outcomes of students.
• 6.3.4 Implement professional dialogue within the school or professional learning network(s) that is informed by feedback, analysis of current research and practice to improve the educational outcomes of students.

Feedback

Email questions, comments and feedback about this resource to contactcurriculumreform@det.nsw.edu.au using the subject line 'Transition from primary to high school – Transition practices in the Yass Learning Network.

Meg Couvee

My name's Meg Couvee. I'm the Director, Educational Leadership for the Yass Principals' Network. The importance of a successful transition to high school can't be underestimated. By improving our transition from primary to high school, we're going to improve student sense of belonging and ensure that every student is known, valued, and cared for at school. As the DEL of the Yass network, I have a strategic role to play in supporting the continuous improvement of all principals and their leadership teams in the network. I provide differentiated support to my principals in their pivotal role for leading and managing their school. And of course this includes ensuring quality transition from primary to a secondary setting.

Andrew Facer

I'm Andrew Facer. I'm the Principal at Yass High School. Yass High School has 7 partner primary schools: Yass Public, Berinba, Bowning, Gunning, Murrumbateman, Wee Jasper, and Dalton. The Yass Learning Community covers a very large area with significant distances between our schools. You know, it's 60 kilometres to some of my partner primary schools. We take as many opportunities as we can for the high school to be connected to the primary schools.

Belinda Brown

Bowning is part of the Yass Learning Community, which includes the larger primary schools as well as other small schools in our area. We work really closely with other small schools in a professional learning community.

Amber Gavidi

Transition starts for our enriched learning students at the beginning of Year 5, where we talk about the options for high school and the transition process. These transition goals are then embedded into students' individual learning plans or education plans that start at the beginning of Year 6.

Andrew Facer

For small schools like Dalton, who might have 8, 10, 20 students, we work particularly hard with them to support them to transition into high school with 530 students in our school.

Michelle Fahey

We come together as a learning community, especially with our leadership team, it's a very close-knit group. We are working on different ways that we can deal with the isolation of our students and give them expertise in all aspects of their learning.

Andrew Facer

We work closely with staff to ensure that everyone in our learning community is upskilling in their pedagogy and practices.

Liz Beasley

Stage 4 teachers are coming down to Stage 3 and having a look at what they're doing in their class, how they're engaging students, what practices they're using, some explicit teaching strategies. And then Stage 3 teachers come up to Yass High School and work with the Stage 4 teachers to help them embed some of those practices.

Belinda Brown

When we look at curriculum, it is around that continuity of learning, understanding our curriculum, how it moves from Kindergarten to Year 1 to Year 2, all the way to Year 6, but then understanding what they're going to learn in Year 7 as well. Building relational trust with our partner high school is the backbone for supporting students' continuity of learning.

Andrew Facer

Strong relationships and partnerships are maintained with our partner primary schools throughout the term by meeting regularly as a group of principals, as a whole executive team, and as a whole teaching and support staff group, ensuring that our goals across all schools in our strategic improvement plans are known and we can support each other to achieve them.

Belinda Brown

Our partnerships with families as well as the local community groups create really authentic learning opportunities for our kids to have high engagement.

Michelle Fahey

The impact of this has been our students are much more comfortable moving to high school, they've got familiar faces, but it's also about that collegial discussion and relationship that has been formed between the teachers from Yass High and the teachers from primary school.

Meg Couvee

Collaboration is a really powerful way to deepen the capacity of teachers and to harness the power of the collective. We value coming together regularly as a PLC because it really opens up the lines of communication and builds trust.

Michelle Fahey

We use the New South Wales Plan for Public Education as the scaffold for all the decisions that we make. It's the engine that drives what we do in our learning community and it impacts across all of our schools.

Liz Beasley

In the leading domain, we're looking at the continuity of learning and the transition from preschool into kinder and also into Year 6 into Year 7. But we're also looking at the teaching domain because we really want to make sure we're having effective classroom practice across all of our schools.

Meg Couvee

There is a strategic focus in the Yass Learning Community on optimising middle school activities across schools. We've got systematic and reliable assessment information, which we use in teams, teams of teachers, teams of leaders, to evaluate student learning and inform the most personalised and responsive transition processes for every student.

Liz Beasley

The Yass Learning Community works with evidence-informed practice, and one of the main things that we're working on is making sure that we all have joint determination over what we do and we have joint responsibility and joint accountability for the students in our network. It's not about individual classes, individual schools, this is about making sure that public education in our area is the best it can be, and we all have a responsibility for that.

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