Transition Year: from good idea to good experience

`The most effective schools were those which had set out clear aims and objectives, had carefully drawn up programmes and policies, and had generated a strong team spirit and a sense of commitment among the teachers."

This was the opinion of a major evaluation of the Transition Year conducted some years ago by the Inspectorate of the Department of Education.

However, in spite of continued recommendations that all schools offering Transition Year should have a clearly written programme, not all schools manage to follow that advice. "There is a freedom in Transition Year to devise your own programme," says Gerry Jeffers, head of the Transition Year Curriculum Support Service. "One of the best ways of making sure it's going to be good over a number of years is to write it down. "If somebody gets sick during the year or moves on, when you have a written programme, you can see the process and it can continue smoothly."

Jeffers says that his team is finding in some cases that people need more structure, a better framework for writing a clear programme document. So, together with the Inspectorate of the Department of Education, the Support Service has produced a detailed document, Writing the Transition Year Programme, which should be with all schools by today.

"We're saying: `these are the nuts and bolts of how you are going to do it.' A school has to decide what ingredients it puts into a programme: whether to have a mini-company, whether in English or Irish . . . they need collectively as a staff to go through the process of writing it down so that all the parties know what's going on - parents, pupils and teachers."

Part one of the programme should consist of the general introduction. It should make a clear statement of the school's aims for Transition Year and its overall mission, state the overall school policy on assessment and outline how the school will evaluate the programme.

Part two consists of programmes for individual subjects and modules. The advice here is that everyone involved in co-ordinating and teaching the Transition Year programme should be transparent about the goals and the means by which they aim to achieve those goals. To prevent the programme being under-valued or dismissed as a "free year", there should be information evenings for parents, regular reporting and public displays of students' work and achievements.

A suggested format for each subject or module is given, as are very detailed suggestions and explanations of what can be achieved in various disciplines through a variety of strategies, methodolgies and techniques. In part three, the organisational details of the programme, including lists of subjects and modules, weekly timetables, main calendar features, finances and evaluation, are to be included.

This is the ideal framework within which Transition Year co-ordinators and subject teachers can work, says Jeffers.

He explains that, while the Department's Inspectorate does evaluations of Transition Year, his Support Service gives workshops to help schools review their programmes and helps them to rewrite their programmes to make them more focused.

"Nobody in this country is in any doubt about Transition Year being a good idea - what we're on about is fine-tuning it to make sure Transition Year is a good experience."