Transitions: Students at the centre

So a really key part of our work is transition. That’s probably our biggest goal, is how we transition our kids. So we look at... we’ve got sort of different ways we think about transition – one is physical. So, do our kids know where the school is? How to get around? Who the people are they need to know about? So the physical transition we plan for, but we really feel emotional transition is so key for our kids – so having important relationships with people they are going to see at the next school, and making sure that we make those kids feel safe. So that’s particularly around our priority learners that they feel emotionally safe.

Then we really believe that learning transition is key. So we know where we collect the data [from]. We know where they've come from. We’ve done work on consistency of assessments, so we know our assessments are valid. We’ve done things like set our sliders on asTTle so we have consistency. We don’t reassess kids unless we need to because we trust our previous school’s data, and we place them carefully, and we get on and start teaching them because we know where they’ve come from. That transition is really important to us, but also we've done a lot of work around consistency of teaching and learning.

I guess one of the key aspects for us in terms of transition is the idea that relationships are at the heart of what we do. This year, what we've done for the first time is we’ve had the little five-year-olds at the primary school come across and work with our kapa haka. They’ve all planted a little seedling. So they've measured their seedling, measured their own height, and it is our job at the intermediate to care for those little seedlings. When they are in year six, those same students will plant their little seedling – so we in the meantime... it's our job to care for them. So that’s symbolic really of what we see is at the heart of what we’re doing – that transition isn't just a sharing of information that happens just at the end of year six, but it’s a process of developing relationships so that when the students come, they feel safe, they feel like they belong, part of them is already here, and that process continues through intermediate and on to their time at the grammar school.

It was easy moving from Mt Roskill Intermediate to Mount Roskill Grammar because we had performances. I also got to meet some people from grammar school that would later become my friends when I came here. They helped me throughout my years so far.

I would also be a bit more confident because we would be performing for Matariki and the whānau hui and the Māori graduations, so we got to see a lot of the grammar school students.

In and around placement, we find that it’s really important (going back to that idea of relationships) that we really know who the students are as a person. So we spend a lot of time going around our contributing schools, not just with our Roskill Primary, but our other schools as well, we apply this too. So we’re sitting and talking with the teachers, finding out about the students as a person so that we can place them the best that they can possibly be placed. So again, that relationship is important. Identifying children who are are going to need to be monitored and mentored, that need to be placed with support in and around them. Students that need to be extended; students that need to be challenged with their thinking. So having all of that information and seeing them as a person beyond just the data and the statistics of where they are at in terms of their reading level, their writing level, their maths level. All of those things that add to them being a person. A beautiful example of that would be in music. So we had a group of students we knew were particular musicians coming in that could walk the line in terms of other aspects of their learning and behaviour. So it was going to be really important to engage them in school, and so knowing where they were gifted in music we took that and actually set up a music group to hook them in really early on to school. When that group of students were ready to move through into the grammar school that same information was passed on to the grammar school, and they actually set up a year 9 band/music group to hook those students into, so that all the work that they had been doing wasn’t lost. Engaging them in school meant that their learning increased. Of course, as we know, engaged, happy children learn the most. So it’s about thinking about them as a person, engaging those ones who could be at risk.