Strengthening transition practices
Professor Bob Perry
00:00 – 02:04
I've had some delightful experiences recently watching Principals work with groups of children who haven't started at the school - they're pre-Preps - and the ways in which they work to show those children that they actually care about them as people, not just as numbers in their school. One of the things I think is really important is for Principals simply to know the children's names, but also to know their mother's names, their father's names, to be able to talk to the children about things that interest the children.  That can't be done without building up the circle of community relationships, the circle of community professionals; sometime they'll be educators in Prior-to-school settings, sometimes they'll be health people because the child will have a particular health need and the Principal can instigate some work on that. Sometimes they'll be social-emotional needs. 
Whatever school, wherever in Queensland, [it] needs to be affected by its community. It is critical that we make the school environment challenging, but there needs to be support there. So one way in which the Principal can do that very easily is to find out what the children are interested in, find out what they know about, find out how they know about it and begin there, and to have their Prep teachers begin there.