ABSTRACT
The overall argument of the last chapter was that the move from primary to secondary school was profoundly disruptive socially and emotionally and the cause of much anxiety for many children and their parents. Despite a series of educational changes intended to increase parental choice, getting a child into a desired school, especially a secondary one, has become a highly fraught process. For the child, the transition to secondary school is both the focus of a number of frightening stories and a major, looming hurdle to be surmounted. It means learning a lot of new personal and organizational routines, getting-up times, routes to school, and having to carry heavy bags all day as pupils move from class to class and teacher to teacher. The rate of theft is high and lockers, where they exist, are easily damaged. For many children the bullying that they have heard about is a reality, even if it does not go so far as the knifings and bogwashes that the urban myths relate. All pupils are less firmly rooted in one place than they were in primary school and often feel distinctly displaced, lonely and disintegrated.
