The importance of transitions
Principal Bradley Clark
00:00-04:27
I think the reason we wanted to start to think about things differently was mainly around knowing our students; we felt just as though we didn’t know them, and we thought we could do a better job. So we looked at some different ways of going about doing that. That was the initial impetus I suppose.  The second piece of information was the AEDC data – which really provided us with a bit more of a quantitative approach to how we were going to address and what we were going to address. There was much less anxiety for our staff as well, it was very much a known quantity to what we were shaping up for our year. We knew who was coming in, our transitions process also told us how many were coming I; it was a bit of a lottery prize prior to that as to how many would turn up on the first day of school,  and we got some really good processes around that. So as we started the school year off there was no class changes, there was no reshuffling of classes because we knew exactly the students coming in and we knew exactly where to start teaching and learning from day one. It wasn’t just learning routines of the school, there was a lot more value we could add to our students when we had a bit of a better understanding to their background. 
What impacts have you observed?
We have noticed some other long term effects that we hadn’t anticipated on seeing some of those include that strong relationships we have with parents we see translate in to parents having a great communication channel open form the very first day of school, all the way through the student’s career. We also found that parents were really keen to be engaged in school activities; [at] our P&C meetings we would have up to forty parents which astounded me, because in past we were lucky to get ten. Anecdotally, when we asked our parents why they were coming to P&C meetings, they reported that they felt their opinions were valued, that they had a voice, and the had something  they felt they could contribute to the school. 
As far as students go, they biggest thing we have seen is in academic terms. We are finding that our students, because they are receiving earlier intervention, because they are receiving more targeted differentiated teaching from the first day of school, we are finding this is translating directly to academic achievement, especially with literacy and numeracy. We are finding that our students are more capable readers, we our finding our students are a lot more confident engaging with numeracy activities that traditionally they wouldn’t have been looking at  until maybe a semester or year later. 

Why are transitions important?
I think the whole idea of transitions is setting students up to be successful. If students have a really successful start to school they have really good chance of continuing on with that success for the rest of their academic career. Conversely, if students don’t have a great start to school, the effects can be long term. If students aren’t able to hit the ground running, if we aren’t able to have a differentiated curriculum in place for them when they start schooling, turning that around can take months, years and can have a long term effect. We find students who have high anxiety find it really difficult to develop a love of learning and as a result they find it really difficult to engage in schooling.
What challenges have you faced?
Time is a challenge in schools, and that’s not unique to any school. We had the philosophy though - to get time, you have to give some time. We saw this as a very meaningful project that would have outcomes that would far outweigh the actual time that we invested in to it. We saw it as a really good investment, not just for the first day of school but for the longevity of that student’s career at our whole school. Once they were in our school we had those high levels of trust, high levels of strong relationships and that pays massive dividends not just in the first year of school, but every year that follows after that.