Bullock (1975)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Foreword, Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part 1 Attitudes and standards
Chapter 1 Attitudes to the teaching of English
Chapter 2 Standards of reading
Chapter 3 Monitoring

Part 2 Language in the early years
Chapter 4 Language and learning
Chapter 5 Language in the early years

Part 3 Reading
Chapter 6 The reading process
Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
Chapter 8 Reading: the later stages
Chapter 9 Literature

Part 4 Language in the middle and secondary years
Chapter 10 Oral language
Chapter 11 Written language
Chapter 12 Language across the curriculum

Part 5 Organisation
Chapter 13 The primary and middle years
Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
Chapter 15 The secondary school
Chapter 16 LEA advisory services

Part 6 Reading and language difficulties
Chapter 17 Screening, diagnosis and recording
Chapter 18 Children with reading difficulties
Chapter 19 Adult literacy
Chapter 20 Children from families of overseas origin

Part 7 Resources
Chapter 21 Books
Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting

Part 8 Teacher education and training
Chapter 23 Initial training
Chapter 24 In-service education

Part 9 The survey
Chapter 25: I Introduction
Chapter 25: II Primary commentary
Chapter 25: III Secondary commentary
Chapter 25: IV The questionnaire forms (not online)
Chapter 25: V Technical notes (not online)

Part 10 Sumary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 26 Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix A Witnesses and sources of evidence
Appendix B Visits made
Glossary
Index

Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1975
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
[pages 213 - 219]

INFANT AND FIRST SCHOOL - JUNIOR AND MIDDLE SCHOOL

14.1 Over 40 years ago the Hadow Report (1) urged that there should be no sharp division between infant, junior, and post-primary stages, and that the transition from any given stage to the succeeding one should be as smooth and gradual as possible. The Plowden Report (2) developed the same theme, remarking that though contacts between schools were still inadequately cultivated there was evidence of a real improvement. This improvement has continued, so that at any rate it is uncommon to find a school that does not recognise the importance of the principle. This is particularly true where it concerns transition from infant to junior school, with which we are concerned in this section. It was the experience of our visits that the relationship often does not go far beyond an obvious goodwill and a readiness to cooperate in general terms. However, a number of schools have developed a range of useful joint activities. In the first place they have recognised that at the point of transfer a young child has a particular need of security and reassurance. They have therefore arranged an exchange of teachers so that the first year junior teacher becomes an accustomed figure to the young children who will soon be going up to her; or the children themselves have spent days in small groups in the classroom which will be their home the following term. Correspondingly, a teacher from the infants has spent part of each day in the junior school, keeping contact with those recently transferred and in particular the ones who still need help with reading. Schools occupying the same building have set up common working and quiet areas in corridors or other available spaces. There have been joint assemblies, plays and outings. All these are admirable developments which enable separate schools to achieve the kind of sharing that is available to the 5-11 school. Moreover, they are the translation into action of a philosophy of continuity based on regular inter-staff discussion. We are concerned in these paragraphs with the extent and quality of cooperation as it relates to the development of language and reading skills. This is likely to be most successful where it is an aspect of the kind of linked identity we have described. It must be emphasised, however, that continuity in respect of language and reading development needs to receive detailed attention in its own right.

14.2 The first essential is a thorough knowledge of the other school's approaches and methods. If the infant school has followed the practice of observing and recording the children's language development (see Chapters 5 and 17) the junior school must be aware of what has been achieved. Equally, it would be regrettable if a school were to involve parents in the work of the classroom only for the practice to be brought to a sudden end at the point of transfer. Such sharp severances do occur. We encountered situations where the infant school was committed to i.t.a. and the junior school hostile to it. The latter would have no i.t.a. books in the school, so that when the children arrived they were uncompromisingly presented with traditional orthography whether or not they had managed the transition. This kind of thing is a symptom of a general lack of sympathy between the schools concerned. And a lack of sympathy results from and results in an inadequate understanding of the other school's objectives and methods. The teaching of reading offers a good example of this. We talked to some junior school teachers who expected every child to be sent up to them 'able to read', or at any rate regarded any who couldn't as the infant school's failures. A number of the letters we received reflected the same opinion. This is to take a very limited view of reading, not to mention the nature of individual differences in children. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that up to a third of the children may have spent only six terms in the infant school and some will have been in the country for only a few months or even weeks. Reading is the subject of too much recrimination. The idea that reading is a once for all process, learned when young and afterwards possessed as a fixed skill, has the effect that the blame is always passed downwards. In the nature of things the infant school is held ultimately responsible. If reading were seen for what it is - a developmental process of which decoding is only one stage - there would be a better chance of mutual understanding. It is unrealistic to insist that certain objectives are the sole responsibility of the infant school, and that the junior school should be able to plan a programme on an assured base line. The recognition of this is a feature of those schools which have developed a high degree of cooperation. Where they exchange teachers, have a regular programme of meetings, and discuss examples of children's work, they will come to understand and perhaps share one another's approach. They will arrive at a set of realistic objectives which are regarded not as fixed goals for each age group, but rather as a series of 'landmarks' attainable over the years.

14.3 When a group of children move into a junior school or department at the beginning of the school year the range of their capability, performance, experience and circumstances is considerable. In some areas the summer-born will have had the disadvantage of completing only six or seven terms in their first school, while others will have had a full nine terms*. Some children will have passed the entire five or six weeks' holiday without access to a word of print, and their reading ability might well have regressed. Others will have read to their parents every day and had stories read to them, and they will have gained in fluency. Missing the support of the constructive talk of the infant school, some will have had very little sustained two-way conversation in the home. Others will have been encouraged to talk about their experiences and will have had long conversations with their parents. The receiving teacher should be informed of all this. She is likely to know that a child has had less than the full nine terms in his first school. She is less likely to know his experience of language in general and reading in particular within the home. Older brothers and sisters are a guide, and schools grow to know some families extremely well as one child follows another. However, for all its apparent predictive reliability this is a crude indicator. Every child is an individual, and the receiving teacher needs detailed information about the children who come to her. Ideally she will have met and perhaps worked with the child and his teacher frequently over the past year, in his classroom and her own. She will know what her colleague has been doing to develop the child's linguistic repertoire. She will have met the parents in the infant school. We accept that what we have described is an ideal and may be rarely attainable in full, particularly where large junior and middle schools draw children from a number of sources. Nevertheless, we believe it can and should be done by all schools to some degree, and the more highly developed the relationship the better. To be effective it requires the commitment of the teachers, above all of the heads, and collaborative planning of the right kind.

*In Barker Lunn's study (Educational Research Vol. 14 No. 2) 26 per cent of the children were found to have completed nine terms in the infant school, 24 per cent had completed eight terms, 24 per cent seven terms, and 26 per cent six terms.

14.5 Our survey showed that 39 per cent of the teachers of the six year olds kept examples of children's written work from year to year as a progress record. What the responses could not tell us was whether this accumulation of written work was passed on with the child to his next school. Such a 'profile' would obviously be of great value to the junior school, and we recommend that all schools should consider adopting this practice. Only three or four examples a year need be included; too copious a collection would defeat the purpose. One important benefit would be to help teachers towards realistic expectations. Wiseman (3) and others have pointed out that a teacher's expectation of a pupil's performance can have a powerful influence on the quality of that performance. If teachers frequently discuss actual examples of children's work and such folders are compiled then the assessment will be more soundly based.

14.6 Just as some of a child's writing should accompany him, so should his reading material. One outcome of the kind of cooperation we have advocated would be a continuity of approach between the two schools. We have already referred to the kind of acute disjuncture sometimes to be found where a junior school is hostile to the i.t.a. through which the child has begun to learn to read. A less severe and more common practice is to introduce a reading scheme completely different from the one with which the child has been familiar. The security of familiarity is essential to a child who is still having some difficulty with reading, and he will respond better to the spur of new material when he is working from a well-established base. On the other hand, the child who is reading well will welcome the stimulus of a variety of new books, and any continuity of approach should take account of individual need for fresh enterprises. Ideally, the two schools should plan together a joint programme for the development of reading. Elsewhere in the Report we have recommended book-selling activities in school. We hope that where a child has become accustomed to this facility he will not lose it at the next stage. When an infant and junior school occupy the same building they might share book club or book shop facilities. Where this is not the case the schools should discuss ways in which they can cooperate to expand the children's reading opportunities.

JUNIOR AND MIDDLE SCHOOL - SECONDARY SCHOOL

14.7 There has been a gradual increase in the development of liaison between primary, middle, and secondary schools, and some excellent schemes have been evolved. Some secondary schools have appointed a member of staff, usually a teacher of first year pupils, to maintain contact with the contributory schools. In a few instances the secondary school sends the children's first year progress reports to their former school to let their teachers see how they have settled in. Schools on both sides of the point of transfer have organised joint events, and the younger pupils have learned to feel at home in the upper school well before they have come to join it. Members of staff have exchanged visits and in some cases teaching assignments. Activity of this kind is by no means the general rule, but there have been some highly encouraging enterprises.

14.8 There are, of course, many schools where the only intimation of a child's earlier education is what is contained in the authority's record card which precedes or accompanies him. These naturally vary a good deal, but they may contain little more than columns for Reading, Speech, Written English, Number, and Intelligence, with assessment on a five-point lettering scale. At their most elaborate they may contain a wide range of diagnostic information and extensive teacher comment. How much does a C against Speech tell about a child's oral ability? Does such a shadowy assessment incline the receiving school to distrust and therefore disregard it? On the other hand does detailed information set up teacher expectations that may 'type' the child before he appears? Questions of this kind tempt some teachers into an unfortunate doubt about the value of transmitted records, and in the absence of inter-school contacts the two phases may work in relative isolation from one another.

14.9 The English teacher may feel that within a comparatively short time he will be able to assess his new pupils on the strength of the work they produce for him. He may therefore ask whether there is much value in his knowing what has happened before they reach him. We have made clear our conviction that there is, and that a knowledge of their language experience in all its forms is essential to him. Where there is a well-organised policy of general liaison at school level this will be easier to acquire, but in our view continuity is so important that links should certainly be established between secondary school English departments and the contributory primary schools.

14.10 Transmitted records are but one aspect of this policy of continuity, and the information they contain should be such as to give genuine guidance to the secondary school English department and to teachers of other subjects. Vagueness of definition is unhelpful and is paradoxically more likely to set up confining expectations than is an extensive array of information. The right degree of detail enables teachers at both levels to meet on commonly understood ground. Subjective assessment is valuable, but it is the more revealing for being supported by objective data and actual evidence of performance. As in the case of infant to junior school transfer we have in mind a profile which would include diagnostic information and examples of written work. The essential thing about diagnostic data is that they should help the receiving teacher to plan his work in respect of the particular pupil. Again a bare reading age is not enough; the teacher in the secondary school should have access to the experience of the child that other teachers have accumulated over the years. Several have worked with him, have had opportunities to identify his difficulties, and know what has succeeded and what has failed. All this valuable information should not be allowed to go to waste.

14.11 In the matter of language continuity there seems to us no substitute for a study of children's actual production. This is why we suggest that the developmental profile should contain examples of pupils' written work to the extent of three to four pieces per year. This cumulative record of language development, supported by teacher comment, would be of considerable practical value to successive teachers. It should be accompanied by an indication of the books the pupil has read and by the results of informal reading inventories (see Chapter 17). We have suggested that an increase in voluntary reading is an important factor in the improvement of reading attainment in the late junior and early secondary years. Obviously, a teacher cannot know everything a child reads, but as comprehensive a picture as possible of his reading habits would be a valuable instrument. At the most obvious level it tells the teacher a great deal about that particular pupil and provides a foundation from which to develop his future reading. It seems to us a haphazard procedure when a secondary school teacher can receive a child without any information on his experience of reading beyond what he can glean from the child himself. We regard it as fundamental that this kind of information should be recorded and should form part of the profile which one teacher passes on to another.

14.12 Behind the word 'continuity' there lies the implication of a positive attitude to cooperation between the phases. It is our experience that primary and secondary schools often know little of one another's methods and aims. Where they do, there is usually sympathy; where they do not there is the possibility of misunderstanding, prejudice, and an inclination to denigrate. The stereotype is that primary school methods are always to be identified with process, creativity, and self-determination; secondary school methods with content, rigour, and direct instruction. This, it need hardly be said, is far from the truth. We are arguing here not simply for the transmitted knowledge of a particular pupil's capacities and needs but for a mutual understanding of what has been and will be involved in his experience of language. A child can leave the primary school with a well-defined awareness of his teacher's range of response to his writing. Within weeks he is in a school where several teachers are making different kinds of demand on his written language. He does not know their expectations, and indeed he may well be quite unprepared for the linguistic demands made upon him.

14.13 Expectations need to be realistic and they need to be informed by a first-hand study of how children write and talk in response to the needs of a given situation. In Chapter 12 we recommended the development of a language policy across the curriculum in secondary schools. At this point we are suggesting that a valuable first step might be a joint study by primary and secondary teachers of children's written and spoken language. This could be associated with an exchange of teaching assignments. We are aware that this is not as simple as it sounds. One secondary school we encountered received pupils from 40 contributory primary schools. This is untypical, but in much less extreme situations there could still be considerable difficulty in arranging this kind of cooperation. Nevertheless, there seems to us a good case for accepting it as a principle. It is impracticable to expect secondary school teachers to sustain separate discussions with each of a large number of primary schools, still less teach in all of them. But joint conferences are a viable proposition, and the opportunity can be created for various groupings for this purpose.

14.14 It is not only at the level of staff contact that possibilities exist for cooperation between primary and secondary schools. There is scope for the kind of activity in which older children work with and for younger ones. This might, for example, take the form of the writing of stories for six or seven year olds by fourth year junior pupils. They would need to talk with the younger children about their interests and their favourite kinds of story as part of the preparation for writing. After drafting the stories they would ask fifth and sixth year secondary pupils to act as editors, and from the resulting discussion the stories would emerge. Their writers would then read them to some of the younger children and listen to others using the stories as part of their own reading material. By applying an informal reading inventory the writers would be able to refashion their stories to adjust readability levels, and this would entail further visits to their editors, with whom all the implications would be discussed. Finally the stories, attractively printed, would take their place among the young children's reading matter. In a project of this kind, which is capable of many variations, children are cooperating at various levels for a real purpose. The junior and secondary pupils are involved in discussions about shaping language to do a particular job, and they have to study the needs and interests of young children to do it.

14.15 In their role as providers the older pupils gain at least as much as the ones they are helping, and this is a characteristic of 'cross-age tutoring'. This is an activity which has been employed extensively in the USA and is being tried by some schools in this country, often with the help of Community Service Volunteers. Older pupils give individual tuition to younger ones in their own or another school, deriving help and support from their teachers in sustaining it. This has been found to develop a relationship from which the younger child gains a new kind of support and the older pupil a feeling of responsibility and achievement. The schools which have adopted it do not minimise the difficulties and the obvious need for patience and diplomacy in organising such a scheme. But they are almost always enthusiastic about its benefits, both direct and indirect. Given the right degree of commitment this kind of work can be a profitable form of cooperation between schools.

14.16 It has to be frankly acknowledged that despite advances there are still many schools which have almost no contact with the one that precedes or follows them. In our view effective liaison is a priority need, and if it can include practical activities of the kind we have been describing there will be a considerable gain in the understanding of one another's objectives. We have urged that reading be regarded as a continuously developing skill and that language be extended to meet increasingly complex demands as the child grows older. Neither aim can be achieved without close cooperation and mutual confidence.

References

1. Reports of the Consultative Committee HMSO: 1926, 1931, 1933.

2. Children and their Primary Schools HMSO: 1967.

3. Wiseman S The Educational obstacle race: Factors that hinder pupil progress Educational Research, 15, 87-93: 1973.