Literature on student transition between primary and post-primary illustrates that
how schools integrate students and choose to organize teaching and learning
supports or contributes to transition difficulties for students. This qualitative study
finds that despite statements in official documentation that curriculum continuity
exists because it is built into curriculum design, it in fact does not exist in sixth class
primary and first class post-primary teacher classroom practice. Local curriculum
structures influence teacher classroom practise and affect the continuity of students’
educational experience. The existence of a dominant curriculum orientation towards
academic rationalism influences the patterns of relationships that exist between and
within schools. It is a culture dominated by compliance with historical processes and
educational cultural legitimacy between schools, teachers and students. The enquiry
was undertaken as a qualitative case study using semi structured interviews with
teachers and principals and focus groups with students.
While numerous Irish educational reports identify the importance o f transition there
are deficiencies in the directions they take to address the problems they have
identified. The real issues around transition for students arise out of the failure of
primary and post-primary schools to reorganize their structures in how they educate
early adolescents. The structural processes of educating students in individual
schools are influenced by the culture of the school, its notion of what curriculum is
and whether education is understood and approached as a continuum. While primary
and post-primary schools, in this study, have little shared sense of educational
purpose the teaching of sixth class primary and first class post-primary contain
similar instructional methods. This deficit of purpose and similarity of instruction is
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due to how schools share in national ‘socio-cultural-political processes that shape
the content and orientation of curriculum, and legitimize what good teaching
practices are, and to what ends’ (Callan 2006, p.7). Students experience schooling
problems rather than transitional problems in such educational environments
