Strengthening transition practices
Principal Bradley Clark
00:00-03:01
We changed our mindset for what we wanted in a transition process. It wasn't the question of, are these kids ready for school? It was the question of, are we ready for these students? Once we flipped that thinking on its head, we found that we took ownership a lot better of how we took students into the school. That opened up the door for looking at the academic progress, looking at the social-emotional needs of students as they start off the school year, as well as the expectations and the needs of their parents as well. 
What is your role in transition to school?
I think the role of the Principal through the whole transition process is to really clearly model and value what's important in the transition process. That's around relationships, that's around modelling getting to know the students, and that's around supporting our staff to be able to do that as well. That means releasing teachers to be able to go and visit the early childhood centres. That means dedicating my time to make sure that I put it as a priority to build the relationships with parents before they come into the school. 
So it really is about modelling the ethos that we want to see around the transition process, which really reflects the broader culture of the school. 
What challenges have you faced?
The challenge for strengthening that transition process is one that's always going to be there. We find that staff at early childhood centres have a fairly high turnover rate sometimes. So those relationships have to start new every year or every second year sometimes, so maintaining them is a challenge. 
The second part for us is that reflect practice, it's what's working well now may not be working well next year or may not be working well in five years' time. So we've got to build in some more precise feedback mechanisms for us that give us some pretty immediate feedback to tell us what we're doing is working. Also, what we're doing at the start of the academic school year has high yield as well. 

Advice for other Principals
It's not a formula, the approach to the transition process. I have learnt that every school is different. We shared our model with some other schools across Brisbane, and they took the main concepts of that model and implemented their own transition process. They got just as outstanding results, but they took some very different actions. The key to it was the initial reflection, and the initial mindset to look at doing things differently. 
What we were doing was great, and it was working well. What we had to acknowledge was, we could do it differently and potentially get some better outcomes.