Shirebrook students create video tour to prepare new starters for secondary school

Students at Shirebrook Academy spent a week filming sequences that explain how to find different departments, locate the toilets and even how to work the photocopier to ensure that the new year seven intake will be able to find their way around the school when they join in September.

The academy runs a comprehensive transition programme to prepare future year sevens for their new start and would currently be busy sending its staff and students into its local feeder primary schools to discuss any concerns or issues that they might have.

It also usually invites year six students in for normal lessons during the last two weeks of the summer term so that they can hit the ground running in September.

However, although the academy is will continue to open to vulnerable students and the children of key workers and is planning how to safely accommodate year ten students after half term, it has reluctantly decided not to bring any year six students on site.

Helen Wakefield, assistant principal at Shirebrook Academy, said: “Transition to secondary school is a time of great change in a young person's life and we know that many students would be anxious about this, even without covid-19, which is why we do so much work to prepare year sixes for joining Shirebrook Academy.

“We won’t be able to start that work this year because of the lockdown, and so we asked the students to make a video that the new pupils would be able to watch to ensure that they wouldn’t be totally unfamiliar with the school when they arrive.

“We are really disappointed that we cannot provide our usual transition programme but we’re delighted with the video.

“The students have been extremely creative and approached it from a totally different angle to that which I would have chosen, simply because they have a better understanding of what the important things are from a student’s perspective.”