Norwich Opportunity Area (NOA) secondary schools receive students from multiple settings, and students from NOA primary schools move to multiple secondary schools. Secondary schools need detailed student information as early as possible to plan for their new Y7s classes and primary schools want to ensure all necessary information is sent to a pupils’ new school to ensure they are supported and settle well into their new school. Primary schools told us that they were completing different formats for student information sheets for 14 or more different secondary schools (often individual forms for each student). Despite this, primary schools told us that they didn’t feel the information shared was always well used to best support students and fed back that some of their ex-pupils struggled to settle in Year 7 (to the point where some students faced exclusion).
Primary and secondary schools have different approaches to sharing information about Year 6 students moving up to year 7 and this information can be used in different ways. A simple process agreed across multiple schools improves efficiency and provides significant opportunity to improve the use of this information to support students to successfully transition between schools. We developed a common approach, a Common Transfer Document (CTD), to share information between primary and secondary school and used the CTD across the city to streamline the transition process at Year 6-7, benefiting staff, children and families.
