Our webinar with Jennifer Neill, an early childhood teacher who studied the transition to school through examining the experiences of a cohort of transitioning children and their families and teachers, and by transitioning herself to a role as a primary school teacher, offered valuable insights and practical strategies for children’s transition from early childhood education to school. Jennifer discussed how to create a supportive environment that fosters continuity and security for children and their families, particularly through developing and extending the synergies and interrelationships between the early childhood and school curriculums.

The importance of strong relationships and effective communication for transition were key findings, and this includes relationships with places as well as people. Children wanted to seek out familiar people in the new environment of school, and parents were also looking for connections and opportunities to network with other parents. For teachers, the crucial importance of relationships necessitates looking at every conversation with a child and family through a relational lens, and focusing on ensuring that they experience a sense of connection. Teachers also sought relationships and effective communication with each other, especially in regard to curriculum collaboration. While it may be difficult for teachers to manage relationships between the number of different places that children transition from and into, a close relationship between one early childhood setting and school is a great starting point. This can develop familiarity and provide everyone with opportunities to understand each other’s spaces, rhythms, and needs.

New entrant teachers should ideally begin to bridge relationships with the child and family before they start school. For example, if new entrant teachers can visit the child in their early childhood setting, it provides an opportunity to get to know them in a place where they feel confident and competent, and enables the child to lead the information-sharing. Teachers can view the child’s profile book with them, and get a sense of their learning journey so far. When new entrant teachers are focused on building strong relationships from the outset, children feel seen and understood, and families in turn also feel more settled and calm about the upcoming transition. Early childhood teachers can take the initiative here by personally inviting new entrant teachers to visit, while primary teachers can invite groups of children and teachers from local early childhood settings to visit them.

Child readiness discourse might be challenged or complemented by a concept of school readiness. The concept of child readiness puts the onus on the child to become ready for school, which involves a lot of pressure on the child, their family, and their early childhood teachers. It also leads to the unnecessary quantification of outcomes, rather than observation of a more holistic range of skills, dispositions, and competencies. School readiness, on the other hand, focuses on school environments, and how school spaces can be developed to create a sense of familiarity for the child in terms of play resources and activities. Familiarity is an important component for enabling continuity, and can support children to connect to the new space with a sense of wellbeing and belonging that they associate with their early childhood setting.

Children may experience anxiety about the transition to school and this can lead to regressive behaviours such as increased attachment issues, and problems sleeping or wetting themselves. It is important to reflect on the messages that children receive, as there are strong societal pressures about how they should feel about turning 5 years old and going to school. Teachers can try to communicate gently and softly about school, or perhaps remove the emphasis on school discussion entirely, allowing children the relative safety of feeling confident and competent in their early childhood setting for as long as possible. Transition can be trickier for children with additional support needs. These children critically need strong relationships and partnerships, so that teachers can be uniquely attuned to and understand how to decipher their behavioural cues.

Where anxiety is present, new entrant teachers can focus on creating a familiar context, which involves really understanding the curriculum of early childhood and in particular using the strategies and learning outcomes described in the Relationships │ Ngā Hohonga principle and the Well-Being │ Mana Atua and Belonging │ Mana Whenua strands of Te Whāriki. Teachers can reassure parents that any regression is not uncommon, and a result of the range of normal feelings that accompany any transition, even though children may not be able to understand or articulate these. Children can have unrealistic expectations of school learning,imagining that they will learn to read straightaway. Therefore it is important to protect their learner identity, and emphasise and make space for them to use the skills they have already in their new learning setting.

Dual curriculum knowledge is important for teachers of transitioning children. An understanding of the previous or subsequent curriculum document can really strengthen the continuity of learning for children, and where knowledge of both curricula can be embedded in each space, familiarity naturally follows. Early childhood teachers might support transition by developing their understanding of the New Zealand Curriculum [NZC] in schools, so that they can see what the expectation is, as well as where the commonalities lie. The first half of the NZC is the most important for early childhood teachers to understand, as well as the flowcharts of the connections between the five strands of Te Whāriki and the five key competencies of NZC, and the Pathways to School section (p. 51-57) of Te Whāriki. Early childhood teachers might then start to write learning stories using the language of the NZC’s key competencies alongside the learning outcomes of Te Whāriki. Primary teachers can refer to Te Whāriki to develop a local curriculum of pedagogies and philosophies for their classroom, creating a classroom culture that works alongside their accountabilities for teaching the NZC. Te Whāriki can be especially helpful as a tool for observing and assessing children at play, to complement information from standardised response tests, to provide continuity with the style of assessments with which children and families are already familiar from their early childhood education, and to promote the child’s and family’s understanding of the child as a competent and confident learner in the primary classroom. Play is still really important for young children! The play pedagogies used in early childhood should not be changed or truncated because children are about to transition to school. Neuroscience clearly supports a focus on play and hands-on activities that support children’s learning trajectories related to language and sensory knowledge in early childhood, and that provide an important and necessary foundation for the higher cognitive functioning that becomes more prominent at around age 7. Early childhood teachers should be aware of and guard against the effects of schoolification (the trickle-down of academic learning and practice from subsequent stages of education, reflected in pressure for children to be practising skills, behaviours, and activities that they will need in primary school). Primary teachers should be encouraged to support playful and hands-on learning that is age appropriate (while retaining space for explicit teaching as required by NZC). It is also to remember that children with additional support needs may require longer to work on and master language and sensory information, and this type of learning may extend across their primary schooling.