How school transition acts as a status passage
Every year in England, around half a million children become secondary school students (DfE, 2013). Some might share Matthewâs opinion, that at primary school âyou just feel like youâre too old, thereâs thousands of young kids underneath youâ and are ready to move on. Others may prefer the security of their primary school classroom teacher and classmates to a larger school with different teachers for each subject. Either way, the majority report settling in well to their new school after the first term (Gray, Galton, McLaughlan, Clarke & Symonds, 2011), despite having to adjust to different teachers, new peers, additional subjects and more complex timetables, buildings and grounds. Each of these changes in school environment marks a new area of experience that children utilise when constructing their identities. After transition, Ruby reflected that âwhen I was in primary school, if I fell over theyâd come running to me like theyâre my mum. But here I fell off my stool and the teacher just shouted at me.â She then described how the âtougherâ attitude of secondary school teachers made her feel more responsible for her own behaviour. Children can also feel more mature simply by leaving primary school, as Billy explained to me in his third term post-transition: âI was excited that I was moving and growing up and stuff ⌠cause itâs secondary school and thereâs more older people. I think that as thereâs older people, Iâm more older as well.â
If we consider how same-aged children develop in non-Western cultures, we can see that many features of school transition are similar to those of adolescent initiation ceremonies that signal the end of childhood. These ceremonies or rituals are conducted in over two thirds of pre-industrial societies (Schlegel & Barry III, 1991) and usually require children to undertake a rite of passage in an area valued by that community such as sexuality, fertility, valour, wisdom or responsibility (Schlegel & Barry III, 1979). In order to complete the rite of passage, children must experience some type of physical or mental change. Ndembu boys in Africa are circumcised at puberty, which qualifies them to take part in hunting ceremonies (Turner, 1967), while Micronesian Butaritari girls have their skin oiled and stomachs bound at first menarche (Brewis, 1996). After the ceremony is complete, children are awarded a new role of being a responsible member of adult society.
In many ways, school transition serves the same purpose for children in our communities. Although it is not officially linked to puberty, transition occurs at or around the same time as the average child (age 11.5 years) experiences their first outward pubertal changes, such as growing pubic hair, breast buds and first menarche or ejaculation (Coleman & Coleman, 2002). When they think of secondary school, children and adults note that âschool takes on the quality of a training centre for their future adult roleâ and that it is time âto get down to business ⌠to take oneâs education seriouslyâ (Higgins & Eccles, 1983, p. 35). Making new friends, being taught by subject specialist teachers, learning new subjects and being part of an older peer group all serve to convince children that they have acquired the characteristics of a secondary school student, and this is often followed by a change in their behaviour and expectations as I discuss later in this chapter.
The term âstatus passageâ was first applied to school transition by researchers Linda Measor and Peter Woods in their book Changing Schools (1984). Glaser and Strauss (1971) define it as an event where people change into a different social role that appears more or less responsible, mature or demanding. Besides school transition, there are many other status passages in Western culture, including learning to drive, getting married, and retiring from work. However, school transitions in state education systems are perhaps the most ingrained, as they occur for a majority of people in each developed country, at a set time in the lifespan. Although headteachers and teachers can control certain qualities of this status passage, such as whether children move into classrooms that are more or less demanding, many significant features of the passage are cemented in school structures. The change from a smaller to a larger school, for example, is typical of middle and secondary school transition in the UK. Below, I explore how these characteristics have emerged historically, in a bid to better understand how a national status passage with wide-scale implications for childrenâs psychological wellbeing has developed.
Why does school transition as a status passage exist in England?
The dominant age of transfer at 11 or 12 years to secondary school is a relatively recent phenomenon in English educational history. During the late Victorian era, a series of Elementary Education Acts (1870, 1880, 1891) established the first national school leaving ages: 11 years in 1893 and 12 years in 1899. 1 However, most children lucky enough to complete elementary schooling transferred to the workforce, where they toiled as farmhands, in small workshops, as domestic servants and, in fewer cases, as factory labourers (Frost, 2009). These positions often involved long hours of work for little pay.
Over the next 40 years, a flurry of school types emerged for older working-class children, enabling children to avoid entering the workforce before age 14 years. An early version was the âhigher gradeâ schools, which offered two or three more years of education in elementary school buildings. Often the curriculum of these extra years geared children towards entering trade or industry (Howe, 2011). In the early 1900s, these schools were grouped together with junior technical schools and public grammar schools by the 1902 Education Act under the first national system of secondary education. This system was divided internally by the curricula of these schools, with some preparing children for entry to working-class jobs and others promoting entrance to liberal professions (Richardson & Wiborg, 2010). The latter type based their curriculum mainly on that of grammar schools, by teaching more academic and less technical subjects. As such, they were the archetype of the secondary school curriculum today (Chitty, 2002), and of many of its differences to primary schooling.
This confusion of secondary school types in the early 1900s resulted in the existence of a range of ages of transfer from elementary to secondary education in the first few decades of the 20th century. In a report on adolescent education (1926), Sir William Henry Hadow (1859â1937) recommended that children transfer from primary to secondary education, preferably in a different school, at age 11 years. This was so that âat the age of 11 children are beginning a fresh phase in their education, which is different from the primary or preparatory phase, with methods, standards, objectives and traditions of its ownâ (p. 89). Hadow rationalised that a clean break in education would fit well with the transition to adolescence, which he described as âa tide which begins to rise in the veins of youth at the age of eleven or twelveâ (p. xix). Hadowâs vision of transition at age 11 years was based on matching educational phases to childrenâs developmental stage, following the popularisation of the notion of adolescence by G. Stanley Hall in the early 1900s.
It was another 18 years before Hadowâs recommendation on the age of transfer was formally recognised by the 1944 Education Act. In the winter of 1940â41, the Educational Reconstruction Committee met in Bournemouth to discuss how to further nationalise the education system, and as part of these discussions the committee debated whether children should transfer at the age of 11 or 13 years. The majority of board members supported the later transfer, based on the grounds that children were better equipped to choose a vocation at this age (Richardson & Wiborg, 2010). However, the Education Secretary went against the majority by setting the age of transfer for 11 years, in order to keep the standard grammar course for 11- to 16-year-olds intact. Essentially, this move cemented the view that children need a clean break in education as they enter adolescence.
Over the next 20 years, English secondary schools became more specialised â as either technical schools offering vocational education, modern schools with a mixed academic and vocational curriculum or academic grammar schools. Entrance to a specific type was decided by childrenâs results on the 11+ examination sat at the end of elementary school. Because of this, school transition in early adolescence became a formal marker of whether children would go on to have an academic or vocational occupation in society. In this era, the concerns voiced by advocates of a later transition at age 13 years became a reality.
For years there was dissatisfaction with the social inequality imbued by the tripartite system. This spurred further reorganisation in the early 1960s to a comprehensive curriculum for all children, introduced by the 1964 Education Act. The backdrop to this Act included a review on the state of primary education (CACE, 1967), conducted by Central Advisory Council for England led by Lady Plowden, commissioned by the then Education Secretary, Sir Edward Boyle. Popularly referred to as the âPlowden Reportâ, this review recommended that children aged 8 to 12.5 years be educated separately from their younger and older peers, in order to allow them the benefits of specialist subject teaching without exposing them to the larger, adult-oriented environment of the secondary school. Referring to the child development research of the time, Plowden concluded that because most children would experience puberty after age 12 years, it was advisable to have a higher age of transfer to secondary education. This advice echoed Hadowâs vision of educating children of pubertal age in different schools to their younger peers.
Around the same time, an independent review on the age of transfer was conducted by researchers John Nisbet and Noel Entwistle for the Scottish Council for Research in Education (Nisbet & Entwistle, 1966). These researchers disagreed with Plowden by concluding that the age of school transition should not be dependent on puberty, as puberty occurred over a number of years and was not consigned to any one event. However, neither recommendation had much bearing on the eventual common age of transition that emerged from the educational restructuring in the 1960s.
The 1964 Education Act sparked a period of experimentation, modelled on the efforts of Sir Alex Clegg, the then Chief Education Officer of the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the period leading up to the Act, Clegg trialled schools for 9- to 13-year-olds based on the idea of middle schools in the United States, foll...
