Have now spent more than half the time in primary as I spent in secondary. Have gone from 'they can't even in write in sentences what do they teach them down there?!' to thinking KS2/3 chasm is the key cliff edge in education which harms to the nearly-there cohort the most

As a general rule, transition doesn't go nearly far enough - its about familiarising more than anything else. And awareness of how transition can impact recall and performance needs to be much better understood.

Mad that we can accept children forget things from week to week, but don't have greater understanding of how being in a new setting, bereft of environmental cues, after months away, in an unsettling environment, with teachers using different terminology, might impact performance

We need to plan backwards from that - how we could run transition to mininise the cognitive disruption - but also plan forwards and ask how initial assessment strategies can be used intelligently and not just baseline kids to determine whether we believe their SATS results or not

Because the biggest risk is that the nearly there cohort, perhaps most susceptible to the disruption, get pigeonholed early on as having unrealistic assessment information from KS2 and this first-fortnight assessment determines too much going forward. And we lose them.

Or we decide that because something cannot be done with 100% independence therefore it cannot be done. This misunderstands the nature of developing competence but also entrenches a key transition divergence about different expectations and termniology between phases.

I think back to how we assessed kids in Yr7 and I wince. I suppose it gave me a platform to pontificate about reliability of KS2 data and 'overhelping' but in reality it was just really poor assessment strategy underpinned by weak understanding of memory.

It allowed us to set low assessment points though so our progress looked amazing so there is that

hey but michael if they dont remember it then HaVe tHey rEalLy LeArNed It?