Curriculum Bridging Project (Transition Year 6-7)

Primary schools shared feedback that there is a lack of academic rigour and continuity between the Year 6 and Year 7 curriculum. Some young people find the move between different phases of education a struggle and can experience a dip in attainment. They can also struggle with the new school environment.

A group of primary and secondary school teachers worked to create a bridged curriculum project that could be used as a set of resources that link Year 6 work to the work children will do when they move up to Year 7. Additional funding from the Norwich Opportunity Area (NOA) enabled the work to be accompanied by professionally designed materials and resources and video recordings by professional actors to support the lesson plans and reading. The NOA commissioned Naked Marketing to produce the resources and HighTide to produce the video recordings. 

Teachers in the key subjects of Maths and English took part in inter school visits to better understand where the standard of teaching and content of these subjects overlapped in both Year 6 and Year 7. Teachers visited and observed each other’s Year 6 and Year 7 lessons. Following these observations teachers had the opportunity to discuss what they had observed. 

A follow up meeting of all participating staff, drew out a passionate group of teachers who wished to volunteer to create a specific English curriculum for Year 6 into Year 7 based on their findings and a deeper understanding of each other’s work. 

This team met regularly together over Spring Term 2020 and created a set of online resources for both primary and secondary schools. Their time was paid for by the NOA at a set fee. Additional resources from Naked Marketing and HighTide, such as design work and dramatisations, were commissioned and paid for by the NOA. 

The primary age project was to run over ten lessons in the summer term post SATS, and the high school element was to run over ten lessons from the start of the Autumn term. The outcome of the primary work was to be a quality piece of written work by the Year 6 students that would be sent on to their new high school. The Covid-19 lockdown meant that the original plan was disrupted but the work was found to be accessible online, which was a good option for primary schools to access in the summer 2020 lockdown.

Investment in collaboration between secondary and primary schools creates engaging resources for both phases that supports children with their transition and champions children’s success. 

The collaboration between the committed primary and secondary schools and their staff was exemplary. The result of this collaboration was a truly user friendly, high quality and comprehensive set of resources. These resources are available for other education settings to make use of and can be found in the resources section below. 

We would have liked to have shared the resources and project with more secondary schools and hope to in the future. Some primary schools did not sign up to the project because the secondary school their students moved on to did not participate. In future, we would suggest the secondary schools involved make contact with their feeder primary schools to share the project and ask them to be involved. 

Covid-19 made it harder to properly introduce schools to the materials as face-to-face meetings weren’t possible and there were other significant pressures on schools. It was hard to measure the impact of the project, in the future we would ensure schools shared data about their new Year 7 intake to track and compare the potential impact of this work.

Covid-19 disruption meant that follow-up work to track the impact of the project was difficult but early anecdotal feedback found it to be extremely helpful in engaging students with learning in Year 7. This included students that had not participated in the project at their primary school. This is important to note as it suggests the project had correctly ascertained an engaging theme and level of learning for participating Year 7 students. One school outside of the NOA, had found and used the resources and reported they found them to be so excellent they would use them again.