Not all equal? Exploring secondary school pupils’ journeys, attainment and experiences in an English ‘all-through’ school

In state funded schools in England the vast majority of children transition from primary school to secondary school at the age of 11. An all-through school offers pupils primary and secondary education in one setting and therefore has the potential to offer a smoother transition experience.

Embedded within a school with pupils on both an all-through route and a non-all-through route I draw upon my experience as a researcher, teacher and senior leader to report on the pupils’ experiences of transition. This longitudinal ethnographic case study employs a mixed methods approach to compare transition experiences. By utilising a survey questionnaire, a set of pupil interviews across the transition period and the analysis of attainment data, a rich description of the pupils’ transition experience has been obtained and the two transition routes compared.

The survey questionnaire was completed in September 2023 with 132 pupils (54 all-through pupils and 78 non all-through pupils) who each answered 12 questions. 3 of these questions had multiple subquestions leading to the collection of 49 data points for each pupil and therefore 6468 data points. This data was collected with Google Forms which autogenerated a Google Sheet with raw answers. The answers and associated analysis exist as one excel (.xlsx) file titled ‘Transition Survey Data’ totalling 365KB.

Pupil interviews were completed with 10 pupils (5 all-through and 5 non-all-through) at 3 time points across the transition period (July, September and November 2024). Pupils were asked a set of questions from an interview script and the data was transcribed using Otter.ai. The transcribed data was exported to Google Sheets to be analysed. The answers and associated analysis exist as three excel (.xlsx) files titled ‘Preliminal Interview Answers,’ ‘Liminal Interview Answers,’ and ‘Postliminal Interview Answers’ which are 29KB, 18KB and 26KB respectively.

Attainment data for 143 pupils (58 all-through and 85 non-all-through) in six subjects at 3 timepoints across the academic year (October 2023, February 2023 and June 2024) was collected which totalled 7569 pieces of data. The attainment data and associated analysis exist as one excel (.xlsx) file titled ‘Year 7 Attainment Data’ totalling 49KB.