People Know How have partnered with the University of Edinburgh to offer a fully funded PhD studentship to undertake a participatory action-research project on positive school transitions.
Listening to young people
Now in its sixth year, our Positive Transitions service supports children, young people and their families through primary and secondary school across Edinburgh and East Lothian. The service is designed to support them to feel valued and understood, improve their self-esteem and peer relationships, and enable them to fulfil their potential.
The service was developed from a consultation we ran in 2014, asking over 700 young people what it was like to live in Edinburgh. They identified the transition to secondary school as one of their biggest challenges, leading us to choose this area as the focus for our work.
Engaging in participatory action-research
Eight years after our initial consultation, school transitions remain highly important, particularly for young people who have experienced inequalities. Evidence shows that if we can improve these experiences, we can also improve outcomes. However, the key elements of positive multi-agency transition support for the most marginalised children are not well understood.
One of People Know How’s key outcomes is to ensure positive school transitions for all children and young people. We aim to achieve this locally by delivering projects within the Positive Transitions service in schools across Edinburgh and East Lothian. But we want to take this beyond just the Lothians and use our learning to ensure positive transitions on a national level.
To do this we have partnered with the University of Edinburgh to embark on a multi-disciplinary action-research project in which a PhD student will work closely with us to map the pathways to improving practice across agencies and inform developments in policy.
“At the heart of action research is asking questions and testing out the answers in real time, with practitioners, with families, with children, and getting feedback as the project evolves about what's working and what's not working, to try and develop a better more coherent model about how to best deliver transitions practice that can be really effective for children and young people.”
The project will evaluate what makes a positive transition, developing and testing innovations in practice and local policy to improve experience and outcomes including attendance, social and emotional wellbeing and educational attainment. Taking place in multiple school clusters across Edinburgh and East Lothian, the project benefits from a comparative approach, exploring interventions in two very different local authorities and settings.
The findings of the project will be used to create a model of practice for similar projects beyond the Lothians, aiming to improve pupil transitions into secondary school across the UK. Findings will also enhance theories of secondary school transition, which are under-theorised, and explore intersecting issues such as class, ethnicity, gender, culture and disability, to ensure any practice model meets the needs of all children and their families.
Apply to the PhD studentship
In partnership with the University of Edinburgh we are offering a fully funded PhD studentship to undertake this project. The student will be supervised by Dr Autumn Roesch-Marsh, Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Professor Gillean McCluskey at the Moray House School of Education and Sport. The student will also receive regular support and input from our staff at People Know How, working directly with the Positive Transitions team.
We’re now looking for candidates to apply to undertake this PhD studentship! The deadline to apply is 4 April and interviews will be held on 21 April.