Should children change schools age 11?

According to the Next Steps report by the CBI, it’s time for an open debate on whether transition at age 11 is restricting children’s development. Former all-through school head, Dave Harris, weighs in...

My mind is spinning with questions: “What is the best age to move from primary to secondary?” “Howdo we make this transition less problematic?” “Whydo we get pupils to move at all?”

Perhaps the ‘why’ is where we should start?

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” If “to get to the other side” is the answer, I’m very concerned. Do we simply move pupils out from one system and into another because it is there? If we were to start planning our education system from scratch, would we put a natural break in halfway through? After all, if you were to have the opportunity to build your own house, would you use a different building company to construct each floor?

When running training sessions with cross phase leaders interested in improving their joint working, I have asked them what their goal would be: a primary school that kept its pupils until they were 18, or a secondary school that started taking its pupils from age four? These two schools should be the same thing; the fact that everyone imagines two very different places is the heart of the problem.

The original split at 11 was for practical and not pedagogical reasons, but now the split has become almost ideological. When primary and secondary teachers meet, the relationship is often strained due to entrenched views of subject-focused vs. pupilfocused learning.

If I was planning the education system for Planet Harris, I would decide what skills, attitudes and achievements I wanted my young people to gain before they moved into adult life. I would then develop a spiral curriculum to support each of these and help my children progress up the spiral at the rate which best fitted them. I wouldn’t worry if all children were not progressing at the same pace in every area – in fact, I would worry if they did.

One thing I know for sure is that I would not arbitrarily move groups of children in the middle of their development just because they happened to have reached a certain age. I am pretty convinced that planet Harris’s education system would not have a primary and secondary phase; after all, how would this benefit our children?

I once spent some time in a Danish all-through school, which bizarrely split its 4-17-year-olds into ‘pods’ of three years (ages 4- 7, 8-11, 11-14 and 14-17). Within each pod, pupils could accelerate in any particular subject (e.g. a talented eight-year-old mathematician would work with the 11-year-olds). However, I was stunned to find that pupils couldn’t move out of the pod until they reached the correct age. Presumably our mathematician stayed doing the same thing for three years! Why do human beings do this? We seem to have a desire to control (or limit) everything by age.

Returning to the question of ‘at what age is it best to move to secondary?’, it feels futile – it doesn’t make sense. It is the moving itself that should be in question. If we are to have two phases of education, it follows that the most suitable age would be different for each child. So if we can’t answer the what, our thoughts should move to howwe can make the current system less problematic. The answer lies in our discussion of the why. Let’s try to move the ‘system’ out of our transition; let’s put the heart back into it. Let’s ask what we want for our young people when they are 18, and let’s look at how far they are progressing in every area, not just English and maths. We must start being honest about the differences between the secondary and primary school, not in a critical way, but in a factual one. At the moment, primary and secondary are opposite ends of a cracker – with the child as the part that snaps! I, for one, think it is about time we became the wrapping paper and ribbon encircling the child as the present in the middle.