Inspiring Capability at School

Context

Educational leaders in the North of the UK noticed a drop off in performance when pupils transitioned from primary to secondary school. They suspected that pupils who were able to get their neurodivergent needs met at primary schools did not have the strategies in place to manage the complexity and demands of a secondary setting.

What we did

We wanted to have a way of supporting secondary school pupils to recover their ability to learn at their best as well as a cost-effective way of helping primary school students make a smooth transition.

We asked for a group of year 8 students with diverse processing and behaviours including, but not limited to, traits of ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, and who were exhibiting a range of behaviours from shy to extrovert.

We taught this group of children to become peer coaches and uncover metaphor models for: Learning @ Best, Learning @ Worst, and other themes that the pupils felt were important to them now and when they had transitioned from primary school. We devised games to help them to notice skills they had and to develop new skills and strategies.

As they learned how to uncover their own diverse patterns of thinking, learning and making friends, they came to understand their own systems and to think about the smallest adjustments they could make to support one another as peers in the classroom.

We then invited them to form diverse groups of three, each with different kinds of processing, to become a peer coaching triad for primary school pupils. This allowed them to each view their diversity as positive and contributing to a balanced whole. These triads then went into primary schools under teacher supervision and in turn asked small groups of primary school pupils:

• what they were like at their best and their worst

• what they needed to feel safe, to feel they belonged and to have a sense of freedom in the way they learned and socialised.

What happened next

The pupils designed and ran their own Transition Project before primary schools came up to their secondary school and then acted as peer coaches for the pupils on transition. Teachers, older and younger pupils all rated the project positively. The primary school pupils shared that they felt more confident about transition and better able to advocate for themselves. This was important for us because while we had trained the older pupils the younger pupils’ progress was just as successful and was purely down to the skills of their older peers.