Every school has a transition process and most of them are thorough.
There are handover meetings. Documents that follow students from one teacher to the next. Assemblies about what to expect, sessions for students to meet their new teacher, and careful conversations between staff about which students need additional support. Schools put genuine time and effort into this. And then September arrives and for some schools, somewhere between July and October, ground that was secure in the summer starts to slip. Students who made strong progress through the year arrive in a new classroom, with a new teacher and some of what they’d consolidated falls away. It’s not inevitable. The schools that navigate transition well show that with the right information travelling with students, September can be a running start rather than a reset.
A study published in 2025, tracking more than 100,000 students across 200 schools, measured what happens to students at the point of transition. On average, enjoyment of school falls from around 6 in 10 students in Year 6 to fewer than 4 in 10 by Year 7. The same data suggests that engagement, enjoyment, trust, agency, safety, all dips at the point of transition and doesn’t fully recover across the secondary years.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) identifies three consistent challenges that can affect student progress at transition: social and emotional adjustment, curriculum continuity, and the reset of relationships between students and the adults who support them. The attainment dip at Year 6 to Year 7 is often a product of all three. But curriculum continuity is worth singling out, because it’s the challenge that follows students into every stage where they move on and the adults around them are starting from scratch.
What gets less attention is why it persists in schools that are doing the right things. Schools with good leadership, strong teaching and genuine commitment to getting transition right still see it. Transition is genuinely complex, and the challenge doesn’t always sit where it’s easiest to see.
It’s not only the students you’d expect to struggle. A high-achieving learner can find transition just as difficult if the curriculum expectations in their new setting are pitched too low, or if there hasn’t been enough opportunity to reflect carefully on what they need next. That’s not a failure of intention. It’s what happens when the focus lands on the process of moving students on, rather than on what travels with them.
Schools have been refining transition process for years, and the commitment behind that work is genuine. The question worth sitting with is whether the process is carrying the right things, because when it does, transition becomes less of a pressure point and more of a genuine opportunity to move students forward with momentum.
Most transition documentation records achievement. It tells the receiving teacher what a student has covered, what level they’re working at, what interventions they’ve had. What it doesn’t always carry is a precise diagnostic picture. Where the specific gaps are. What they’ve nearly secured. What’s still shaky beneath a surface that looks fine. What the previous teacher tried, what worked and what didn’t. Without that, September becomes a month of building the picture from scratch. The support that could start in week one gets delayed until the new teacher has gathered enough of their own evidence to act.
Diagnose, Therapy, Test, Revisit (DTTR) gives schools a structure for making that diagnostic picture specific enough to be useful. In Reading, Mathematics and Writing, the gaps that matter most at transition are often not the ones that show up in summative data. They’re the foundational concepts a student has learned to work around rather than through. A child who has developed strategies for managing a gap in place value can look perfectly competent until Year 5 introduces column methods that depend on understanding what each digit represents. A student with shaky reading fluency can hold things together until the volume and complexity of text in the following year makes the gap impossible to hide. By then, the receiving teacher is finding out rather than following up.
The EEF’s Transition Toolkit asks a question that cuts to the heart of it: how is diagnostic assessment used in the new setting to identify knowledge of foundational curriculum concepts and skills? For many schools, this is still an area in development, doing it precisely and early enough is genuinely difficult. Most teachers receiving a new class in September are building that diagnostic picture from scratch, in real time, with thirty students in front of them. That work could have been done during the summer term. When it hasn’t been, it can contribute to the first half term being spent building the picture that transition could have created. The schools that excel here don’t do more. They do it earlier, and they do it with enough precision that the receiving teacher walks into September ready to act.
Transition isn’t only an academic event. The same 2025 study found that a third of girls and more than a quarter of boys don’t clearly say they feel safe at school by Year 9. Feelings of safety fall steadily across the secondary years. Disadvantaged students report lower levels of trust, enjoyment and belonging. Girls are more likely to feel unsafe and worried in Years 7 to 9. The EEF identifies healthy peer networks and school routines and expectations alongside curriculum continuity as the three challenges that shape whether transition succeeds or fails. A student who is anxious about friendships, or uncertain about what’s expected of them in a new classroom, is a student whose academic progress is already at risk before a single lesson has been taught. A transition plan that treats academic gaps and wellbeing as separate problems is already working with an incomplete picture.
Plotting students on a Horsforth Quadrant during transition planning sharpens the conversation for exactly this reason. It maps effort or attitude to learning against progress rather than attainment alone and asks a different set of questions. A student showing high effort and low progress needs something different from a student showing low effort and low progress. Their attainment data might look identical. What’s driving it won’t be. Transition conversations that start from that distinction tend to produce more useful plans.
Most schools don’t need a different transition process. They need the one they have to carry more precise information. To ask more specific questions and to build in enough diagnostic activity during the summer term that the receiving teacher starts September knowing what to do with each student, rather than spending the first half term working it out.
The schools that manage transition well aren’t the ones with the most elaborate handover procedures. They’re the ones where the conversation between current and receiving teachers is specific enough to be useful. Where the focus isn’t “how’s this student doing?” but “here’s exactly where this student is, here’s what they need next, and here’s what we already know works for them.”
That conversation needs to happen before the summer. By September, the opportunity to find the time to have that conversation becomes much harder. The schools that manage transition well have usually made one decision: to treat the summer term as the starting point for autumn, not the end of summer. That decision is available to every school and the tools to support it are in your members area.
PiXL members: Securing the Fundamentals for KS1 and KS2 is in your member area. Built specifically to support the diagnostic side of transition planning, with tools for Reading, Mathematics, GPS and character and wellbeing, as well as guidance for Writing and Oracy that can underpin handover conversations and inform the support students receive from the first week of the autumn term. Log in at pixl.org.uk to access it.
