ABSTRACT
What are the issues about transition for parents? Dockett et al. (1999) studied the views of parents and educators about what is important about children’s transition to school. They found that the majority of parents and educators wanted children to be happy, feel positive, and settle into school routines easily. However, they discovered that the experiences that were part of the transition were ‘multidimensional’, and that different children experience the same process in different ways as they make adjustments to different people, routines and contexts. They suggest that the geographic context is a key factor that affects the transition experience, but that the ways people respond to the issues of transition varied within geographical locations. Factors affecting this might include the length of time and mode of travel to the setting, or the distance between the locations of the pre-school and Key Stage One building, or even the nature of the layout and organisation. Other factors might include the variety of preschool settings the children have attended before entering the school setting, resulting in the children and families not being familiar with each other. They concluded that successful transition programmes would look quite different, as they would be responding to the local community needs.
