Suffolk | Warrington (Coming Soon)
The CILT 7-14 project
Languages are like any other subject in that the key to effective transition lies in recognising and building on a pupil’s prior knowledge, understanding and achievement. It is worth talking to Primary and Secondary teachers of other subjects to look at how they successfully manage transition. Languages teaching and learning do however present their own challenges when pupils transfer to Secondary school. Prior to widespread use of the KS2 Framework the situation on transfer to Secondary school is likely to present a somewhat mixed picture. Even if all pupils in a Year 7 class have studied the same language at Primary school they may have been taught in very different ways or have covered very different areas of vocabulary and different grammatical structures.
Background to the project
In April 2007 the DCSF commissioned CILT to run a project focussing on effective transition from KS2 to KS3 in languages. The key areas of work are:
- To research examples of good practice in transition
- To produce successful models and new approaches to teaching and learning particularly in KS3 to support effective transfer and transition
- To identify national/regional/local needs influencing the different types of guidance that schools will be looking for in order to ensure smooth progression in languages from KS2 to KS3, e.g. multilingual classrooms, selective schools, the range of languages taught.
Read more in the CILT Transition project final report (pdf, 189 KB)
Who is involved?
- CILT – primary and secondary Language Teaching Advisers
- DCSF
- Training and Development Agency for Schools
- HEI partners
- Secondary National Strategy – providing a strategic link to the KS3 Strategic Learning Networks, a number of whom are focussing on issues of transition
- Local Authority languages advisers or consultants
Partners (LAs) involved in this project and links to resources and materials produced are available here:
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These LAs encompass a wide range of school types and sizes, both primary, including some with mixed-age classes, and secondary, and a range of urban, rural, multilingual, comprehensive and selective schools.
Key questions
In the first year of the project our main focus was on the following questions:
- Whose responsibility is transition?
- What are the key issues from the primary school’s perspective?
- What are the key issues from the secondary school’s perspective?
- What about the learner?
- What are the best ways for schools to collaborate?
- How can teaching and learning in Year 7 in particular and in KS3 in general change to meet the needs of pupils who will have been learning languages for 4 years?
- What would be most beneficial in terms of national and regional support?
Transfer and transition – are they the same, are they different, where do they converge?
Although project partners were clear from the outset that we needed during the course of the year to distinguish between transfer and transition issues we were nevertheless keen to “get hold of the curriculum” and to focus on ways of building on children’s prior knowledge, attainment, skills and positive attitudes. As a result of this approach the real differences between transition and transfer have emerged rather more clearly during the first year of this project. We also looked in some detail at how other curriculum areas deal with transition. Not only was this helpful to our thinking on curriculum change and progression but gave us a clear steer in our desire to distinguish between transfer and transition.
As well as referring to a number of recent documents - we also drew upon the following report: The Impact of School Transitions and Transfers on Pupil Progress and Attainment
Galton, Gray and Ruddock, Homerton College Cambridge 1999 – DCSF Research Report No 131.
Read more in the CILT Transition project final report (pdf, 189 KB)
Key findings
The focus of work undertaken so far has very much been on ensuring that primary children approach the move to secondary language learning with confidence and enthusiasm. At the end of this section there are some guidelines taken from the CILT Training Trainers materials and the Part 3 Guidance for the KS2 Framework for Languages and looking at how primary and secondary schools including languages teachers can work together to make this happen.
A few worth mentioning here are:
- Secondary language teachers visit feeder primary schools, team teaching with the class teacher, talking to and finding out about the children and developing a real understanding of primary languages in particular and the primary curriculum in general
- Year 7 pupils visit primary schools to talk about their language learning at secondary school and take part in joint curriculum activities with Year 6 pupils.
- Joint curriculum activities can happen in either the primary or secondary school
- Joint activities/projects are much more effective when they are longer-term activities and not just one-day activities.
Read more in the CILT Transition project final report (pdf, 189 KB)
The future
Embedding and evaluating what has been achieved so far
Much of the work in the first year of this project has focussed on establishing partnerships based on mutual trust and understanding and collaborative working practices. The schemes of work, lesson planning, resources, materials and guidelines that project partners have produced and trialled in a limited number of schools will now be embedded within more schools during the next year. This will allow us to evaluate their impact, change accordingly if necessary and extend the focus of each project.
New partners
For the next phase of this project we have recruited another eight LA partners. Once again we have ensured a spread of regions and different LA and school types. The new partners will work closely with established partners and draw on project work done so far as well as concentrating on some new and important areas.
New areas of focus for 2008/09 include:
- SEN
- Community languages
- Gender
- Intercultural understanding
Read more in the CILT Transition project final report (pdf, 189 KB)
Please visit these pages regularly as further information from the individual projects will be added. We intend that these pages will provide dynamic and new information for both primary and secondary colleagues. We would be very interested to hear from colleagues about successful transition work that it is hapenning in schools already and that you would like to share through these pages. For more information about this project please contact: Carmel O'Hagan |
