TCELT Research Seminar

Dr Charlotte Bagnall

Charlotte is a Lecturer within the Institute of Education at the University of Manchester. She is an applied social psychologist, and her research is focused on supporting children’s emotional well-being and mental health within schools. She is a mixed-methods researcher, with a particular interest in intervention science and co-creation within education. Charlotte is particularly passionate about school transition and how to improve children's emotional well-being during this time. As part of her PhD she designed (see Bagnall, 2020) and evaluated (see Bagnall et al., 2021a) the first universal emotional-centred intervention to improve children’s emotional well-being over primary-secondary school transition. This intervention, called Talking about School Transition, was informed by focus group and case study research conducted in the UK (Bagnall et al., 2019) and USA (Bagnall et al., 2021b) in mainstream and special schools (Bagnall et al., 2021c). Aside from academia, she is also on the BPS Developmental Section Committee, the BPS ECR committee, the BPS Psychology of Education Committee and TCELT-INTR committee.

Liz Stevenson

Liz Stevenson is a Consortium Partner for Birmingham Education Partnership, a new role within the School Improvement Team working with schools across the borough of Birmingham. In her previous role as Transition Manager for a local authority, Liz worked with Charlotte to design and evaluate Transition 5-7, which will be discussed in the presentation. Liz is also the co-founder of TransitionEd.

Primary to secondary school transition is one of the most difficult transitions children face where they experience simultaneous environmental, psychosocial, and academic discontinuity, which can negatively impact their emotional well-being. Interventions that have been developed to counter the negative outcomes children commonly experience are limited in number, sustainability, and reach, and rely on cross-sectional as opposed to longitudinal evaluations. There is an absence of emotional-centred interventions which take an early preventative approach and begin transition support in Year 5 (second last year of primary school in England), despite previous research which has shown gradual support to be the ‘gold-standard’. The current study evaluates a nine-week universal support intervention to develop children’s awareness and ability to cope with the multiple changes experienced over primary-secondary school transition. It targets protective factors at the individual level (coping abilities) and environmental level (ability to seek social support). In this talk, Charlotte, will discuss the process and outcome evaluation findings and their implications for future research, practice and policy.