Everyone remembers their first day of high school. The emotions… scared, excited, lost, overwhelmed. The chaos… lockers, new faces, finding classrooms and where are the toilets?
St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School has developed a program aimed directly at supporting the transition to secondary school for Year 7 students.
A key tenet of the program has been the development of community, a micro community if you like, within the wider secondary school collective, aimed at ensuring students feel fully supported as they embark on their first year of secondary education.
The Year 7 community has a dedicated precinct, centrally located within the school and comprising four classrooms surrounding a central gathering space, a locker area and an adjacent outdoor veranda.
The architecturally designed environment is modern, vibrant and open, featuring floor to ceiling glass walls deliberately selected to enhance natural light and visibility, stimulating imaginations and facilitating creative thinking. It promotes visual interconnectivity and makes learning communal, encourages collaboration and allows visitors to observe students at work. Students can see and be seen, observing their peers’ classrooms to see what they’re doing while being observed themselves. The Head of Year office is also situated within the space and just like the classrooms, is surrounded by glass walls providing uninterrupted line of sight between teacher and students.
Head of Year 7 in 2019, Ysabella Dawson says: “The precinct is a central point for students, a place where they feel they have their own space.
“It’s a lovely way to ease Year 7s into secondary school life. In the Year 7 precinct students feel like they’re in secondary school; there are different classrooms for each subject and multiple teachers, but the precinct provides them with a safety net so they don’t feel like they’ve been thrown into a very big and different environment.
“They have a space they can call their own, somewhere to feel comfortable and where they know they can find their Head of Year, friends or teachers if they need someone to talk to,” Ms Dawson says.
While the dedicated Year 7 precinct is crucial to supporting students’ transition, equally as important is the school’s orientation and pastoral care initiatives.
In the year before starting Year 7, students attend the school on more than one occasion for orientation. These Transition Days focus on making introductions, both with other students and teachers. Students meet their Head of Year and their form teachers and participate in scaffolded opportunities to meet their peers.
As a boarding school, St Margaret’s student body also comprises of many country students, many of whom may have never even stepped foot inside a classroom before, let alone a large secondary school environment.
The transition days serve as an opportunity for all students to gain some insight of what they can expect when they walk through the door on the first day secondary school. They can be reassured they will see some familiar faces knowing they have already made connections.
The transition from primary school to Year 7 is, without a doubt, significant and can be quite overwhelming.
There are a lot of differences between primary and secondary school. Students usually go from having one classroom teacher and only one classroom to multiple teachers, sometimes up to nine, as well as several classrooms located all over the school campus.
Their responsibility shifts from having a bag placed on a bag rack to managing a locker. They have a laptop for which they are responsible, both in terms of its use and its care. Plus, the students have multiple teachers communicating directly with them via email and they need to learn how to navigate the school’s learning management system, The POD.
If work is late or incomplete, it is the student’s responsibility to communicate with their teacher as to why.
The real shift in the responsibility in their learning is a key aspect of the transition from primary to secondary schooling.
Ms Dawson says St Margaret’s Year 7 transition program is focused on “acknowledging these considerable changes and providing the right climate and environment for students to be able to step up and take on that responsibility.”
The first week of school is also focused on orienting students, familiarising the girls with the school campus and where their classrooms are as well as simple tasks often taken for granted such as understanding how to use their locker and how to set its combination padlock.
Students are also involved in sessions on the school’s science of learning program, helping them to understand what goal setting looks like and how to set SMART goals, a strategy to help them adjust to the homework expectation in Year 7.
There is a strong focus on pastoral care. Students are assigned a Year 11 student as a buddy and regularly come together to partake in various activities. Students also participate in a Friends Resilience program with their form teachers, a program addressing a range of topics including feelings, coping strategies, healthy and respectful relationships.
Weekly lunchtime gatherings are held within the precinct, both an Art Lovers and an All Comers Club. The Clubs provide girls with some structure to their lunch times, a place where they can just be and somewhere they can meet others.
The precinct is a busy place filled with the chatter of the Year 7 community as they dart off to their next class or before and after school co-curricular activities. Visiting the locker space is a bit like entering a teenager’s bedroom. At times, there are belongings scattered about but that is also part of the learning experience. The girls are developing their independence and learning to take responsibility for their belongings and are doing so within the confines of their own space, rather than the whole school environment.
The sense of community is almost palpable and so too is a sense of content; a sense that this is exactly where these Year 7 girls need to be at this point in time. It is a stepping stone to the big, wide secondary school world.