The government’s insistence that a key part of primary education is to ensure pupils are ‘secondary-ready’ has caused much debate. Gerald Haigh argues that transition is a joint responsibility.

In line with the latest curriculum changes, the Department for Education (DfE) requires primary schools to aim at producing pupils who are “secondary ready”, defined by measured “floor standards” in numeracy and literacy.

The concept itself is hardly new. In the half of my career that was spent in primary education, we would worry whether our oldest children were ready for secondary school. Invariably, though, most doubts -- including, incidentally, those of the parents -- were about emotional maturity and resilience. 

So far as basic subjects were concerned, we knew we had done our best, and we assumed that secondary colleagues would do the same. Did they not, after all, have inclusion, SEN, differentiation and learning mentoring?

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