Your New School: Longman Tutorial Resources (original) (raw)

Perception to Reality: Pupils’ expectations and experiences of the primary-secondary school transition

Educaitonal Futures, 2013

Pupils moving from primary to secondary school encounter a number of challenges that can affect their social, academic and personal development. This paper explores the expectations and experiences of a group of 10-11 year old primary school pupils who made the transition to an inner-city secondary school in Wales from one of its ‘feeder’ primary schools during 2011. As an exploratory study, an ethnographic approach was adopted with ‘pupil voice’ a distinctive and central feature. Two phases of fieldwork were conducted. The first examined pupils’ thoughts and feelings pre-transition; the second examined the extent to which their experiences matched their expectations in a local secondary school. There were four main findings from the study: the importance of academia; the opportunity to ‘grow up’; social issues; and pupils’ general feelings towards the transitional process (both pre and post-transition).

Using Photo Elicitation Interviews to Explore Newly Arrived Pupils’ Social and Academic Experiences

Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2021

This article aims to shed light on the spatial experiences of newly arrived pupils in relation to both their social and academic life at school. Data is derived from an ongoing municipal project and includes 90 photographic images taken by nine newly arrived pupils as a basis for auto-driven photo elicitation interview methodology. The study draws on analytical spatial concepts and is placed within a theoretical frame contributed by the geography scholar Doreen Massey and three propositions. The interviewed pupils express mainly positive experiences. The findings also reveal the complexity of space in school. Publisher's Note: Two references had originally been left in an anonymized form, the corrected version of the article now contains the omitted information. See http://doi.org/10.33134/njmr.410 for details.

How We Like Our School to Be ... Pupils' Voices

European Educational Research Journal, 2002

Overall research findings have revealed that the school environment both immediate and in the wider sense of the community does play a role in pupils' academic and behavioural outcomes. The present article aims to discuss pupils' experiences of, and suggestions for, the physical environment of the school which they attend. A case study was conducted in the United Kingdom in a primary school located in an area that is characterised by high levels of economic and social deprivation. Methods of collecting data included documentary evidence, interviews, observations, focus groups and pupils' drawings and designs. The study findings have shown that there are great concerns about pupils' learning and behavioural outcomes and that the school experiences overcrowding conditions as well as lack of space and facilities that provide opportunities for creative activities. The pupils themselves also showed awareness about the limitations of their school environment and their disc...

Teachers Preparing For Changes to Learning Environment and Practices in a UK Secondary School

2013

This paper considers teaching staff preparing for new premises intended to facilitate enquiry learning. The existing school consists of self-contained classrooms and teachers mainly teach alone. In the new building there will be large, shared spaces, facilitating movement and different groupings of students and encouraging autonomy for students and teamwork for teachers. We worked with teachers and students to explore current experiences, and anticipations for the new building, centred on an ‘experimental week’ of enquiry learning that took place in an existing large space (a school hall). We have reported the perspective of the students elsewhere (Woolner et al, 2012a) and in this paper we will explore the experiences of the teachers involved, particularly their ideas about the potential for changing practices. We met the teachers before and after the experimental week, observed the week and conducted interviews. The first day, using images and student statements to mediate discuss...

Changing schools - Another kind of transition

When we think of transition, we generally think of moving from home to early childhood education; from early childhood education to primary school, then to high school, and possibly on to tertiary education or training. These transitions follow the completion of one phase of schooling and the beginning of the next phase, and all children encounter these transitions in their educational lives. However, a growing number of children are encountering another kind of transition: changing schools due to mobility during the early childhood, primary and/or secondary phases of their schooling. Mobility can have positive effects on students' achievement, but can also adversely affect success rate in school, leading to lower levels of engagement and reduced chances of high school completion. It can also adversely affect pedagogy and school functioning. This paper describes a recent study of student mobility, conducted in five primary schools in Far North Queensland, where the effects of mo...