Identifying activities for your transition program

This webpage expands on Step 5 of Developing a transition program. It is based on the idea of conducting a workshop with a small team of people to assist you in identifying strategies and activities for your transition program. However, it could also be easily adapted for other situations or completed by one person working alone, although this is not the most desirable approach.

To use this workshop, it is assumed that you have:

• liaised with your local schools
  
  
• formed a representative working group from the schools that will be involved
  
  
• established the broad goals and outcomes of your new transition program
  
  
• provided the group with copies of the transition programs and plans of each school
  
  
• conducted a transition audit and made the results available to the group
  
  
• conducted evaluations of your existing transition activities and made the results available to the group
  
  
• familiarised the group with the four phases of transition
  
  
• familiarised the group with the five areas of action for transition, including printing out for them all the examples of activities in each of these five areas, as provided on this website.
  
  

There are four steps in the workshop.

1. Table 1A (pdf 11kb) is a blank grid containing the four phases of transition and the five areas of action for transition. Hand out a copy of this table to each member in the group.
   
   The working group should then seek to identify all those strategies and activities that could meet the outcomes of the program and the needs of their students, families and schools for each box of the grid.
   
   This will usually involve detailed discussion and careful analysis of each school's transition plan, current transition program and any evaluations that have been conducted. This will help identify those activities that should remain unaltered, those that should remain but need further refinement and those that should be abandoned.
   
   To aid your discussion, your transition audit will identify where there are gaps in your current program, while the many examples of the five areas of action listed in this website may help the group to identify new or more suitable activities to include.
   
   All the strategies and activities identified by the group are then entered on the blank grid. Table 1B (pdf 26kb) is an example of a completed grid at the end of the discussion.
   
   
2. Through further discussion, the group then works through the completed grid with a view to selecting one or two activities from each box that, in combination, create a balanced transition program. Keep in mind that some activities can relate to more than one phase or area of action.
   
   Table 2 (pdf 23kb) is an example of a final table, where a number of the activities originally suggested by the group have now been discarded.
   
   
3. Your proposed grid of activities can be made available to staff and appropriate groups for review and comment. After refinements have been made, the final grid is valuable when planning individual activities because it indicates the intended emphases of each activity and shows how each one relates to the others.
   
   
4. Your final grid can now be converted into a transition plan. This may require an extended meeting of the working group to decide when particular activities should occur and who will be responsible for each one. The final plan could then be provided to school staff and other appropriate groups for review and comment.
   
   Of particular importance would be feedback from those people responsible for implementing the various aspects of the program. Refinements could be made before the plan is distributed to staff for implementation.
   
   Table 3 (pdf 23kb) shows the final grid organised according to specific groups in the school and what they will be doing.
   
   Table 4 (pdf 14kb) shows how all the primary school activities (Table 4a) and secondary school activities (Table 4b) can be plotted on a time chart to help schedule the activities during the year.