Transfer from primary school to secondary school
Aims
The move from primary to secondary school is a significant one for young people it is
tinged with anxiety and uncertainty. A significant minority of pupils fail to successfully
negotiate the transfer to secondary school. To date little systematic attention has been
paid to the impact of the needs of children with SSLD as they enter secondary schools.
These children may bring additional challenges; they are likely to lose access to
specialist language support and their combined difficulties with language, literacy and,
often, behaviour require a complex response from the schools they enter. Given the
range of difficulties reported to be experienced by children with language difficulties we
sought to identify how their experiences differed from those of other children with SEN.
Thus in Year 6 we matched each child with SSLD with a peer who was experiencing a
non-language related SEN. We also identified a child in the same class who was not
experiencing any difficulties by asking teachers to identify a typically developing child.
This provides the opportunity of disaggregating contextual factors, such as school and
locality, from the problems experienced by the cohorts with SEN. These comparison
groups provide the basis to distinguish factors specific to SSLD, those that are general to
children with SEN and those that reflect transfer issues for all children.
Methods
Participants
SSLD Cohort
Sixty-nine children (17 girls and 52 boys), who had been identified in Year 3 as
having a SSLD when they were of a mean age of 8;3 (range 7;6 - 8;10), were traced in
their year prior to transfer to secondary school (Year 6; mean age of 10;8 range 10;2-