Year 7 Review — The Highs, the Lows And What I Would Change

The school year ended just last week, marking the end of Year 7 for us. It was a big one, the move up from primary school, new routines, new faces, new challenges, and it deserves more than a quick “how was your year?” chat over tea. Here is my honest Year 7 review as a parent: the highs, the lows, and what I would change.

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The Highs

From primary to secondary transition

Year 7 had already started on a good note, because pupils in Year 6 have a day when they visit their new school and spend the day there to get familiar with it. How cool is that? I would have loved to have something like this when I was a pupil, but “transition” or “smooth transition” — what is that in some countries? Just go to the new school and figure it out.

The fairness

Not all children are geniuses, and not all children are good at sports, art, English, maths, etc. and we know this. In England, every term, pupils have an individual report sent to their parents to show how they are doing in each subject. By the way, if you are curious about the subjects Year 7 children study, you can read more here. For each subject, the child is assessed and can be at a beginning level, which means he or she is not yet at the expected level of knowledge and understanding; securing, which means the child is at the expected level and has secure knowledge and understanding of the age-appropriate subject curriculum and associated skills; deepening and exceeding, when the child has demonstrated knowledge and understanding well beyond the age-appropriate subject curriculum and associated skills. Overall, even for subjects like art or sports, where not every child is naturally talented, the grading stays consistent — a child won’t get “expected” just because the subject is more practical.

The classwork

Finally, in secondary school, I can see his notebooks, what he is writing (even though I admit that I struggle to understand it, ha ha), what he is studying, and it is so much better compared to primary school, when I had no idea what they were doing. I can help my son, encourage him, and he has had a much better learning experience. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen his English notebook at all, because pupils have to keep them at school.

The subjects

I love the diversity of subjects: from English and maths to drama and food technology. I actually wrote an article about what my son cooked at school, and if you like, you can read it here.

The houses

The school my son attends has six houses, each with a different name and colour. Feels like something out of Harry Potter. My son actually won the House Points Gold Award for his house and received a certificate and a gold pin in the shape of a star with the school logo, saying “Gold Award.” Pretty awesome.

The Lows

My only complaint

To be honest, my only complaint would be in regard to maths test preparation. One week before the test, pupils receive a paper with the names of the lessons they’ve been studying and their codes. The children use an app for maths homework, which they do weekly, but there is also an Independent Learning section where they enter the codes and get access to more exercises on the subjects, at different levels.

The children are encouraged to choose just a couple of the codes where they need more support and practice, but it’s not easy to remember the names of the maths themes and what they were about. For me, as a parent, apart from the ones with a clear name, I had no idea what they were about, especially considering English is not my first language and I did not study here myself. A good approach would be to look over all the codes to get a sense of what the work covers.

On the last test, they received 30 codes on Wednesday, covering more than 10 maths themes, and the test was on the following Monday. Imagine that one code has around 15 exercises — roughly 5 at beginning level, 5 at medium level, and 5 at hard level — so it was impossible to get through all the codes in such a short window, let alone explain the harder exercises and practise them again. Two weeks’ notice would be much better, and I hope things change. We’ll see in Year 8.

What I Would Change

For my Year 7 review, here is what I would change.

Notebooks brought home. I would like all notebooks to be brought home every day, or at least once a week. I found it funny that pupils brought home their maths, science, history, geography, and art notebooks, but not English.

More time to prepare for maths tests. I would also like more time for children to prepare for maths tests, along with practice exercises that are similar to the ones that actually come up in the test.

More food choice. For example, my son would like to buy fish and chips, but he finds the queue so long that he can’t wait in line and still eat his food in a reasonable time. As a result, he ends up having more pizza slices than I like.

Packed lunches. Because of what I mentioned above, a change I will make starting year 8 will be sending packed lunches a couple of times per week.

Year 7 was a lovely year, full of new experiences for both my son and me. I am including myself here, because I did plenty of learning too, especially in Spanish and maths. It is funny how much you end up relearning alongside your child once they bring secondary school home with them.

My son loved it, and honestly, so did I. If this is what secondary school has in store, I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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