What do you wish you'd spoken to DD about before secondary?

[PeterJohnson]

DD has just received the info for secondary, the class chat has already been set up...

What problems did you encounter in Yr7? Is there anything you wish you'd chatted about before it happened?

She's moving from a sheltered 20 children per year primary where everyone knows everyone too well to a 9 class per year secondary. I've started to let her go alone to after school activities.

Sometimes they are green not purple depends on the school. But you should get a stationary list from school about what they need. And even if it doesn't contain a glue stick get a good one as school will have the cheapest ones possible that don't always stick things in very well.

Definitely no big group chats. Check out where the CCTV is and if she feels unsafe at any time stick within sight of the CCTV. Detentions for minor things are not a big disaster. There will be times when things eg punishments are just unfair and there is nothing you can do other than forget about it and move on - much more collective punishment than in primary as its so much more about crowd control as the teachers don't know the kids as well.

How does this work when they are trying to arrange meet ups?

Also, DD's drama group and her Scout group have group chats to organise lessons/meeting/arranging equipment.

I think it's more to ensure they learn how to deal with this and supervision by the parents.

@reluctantbrit there's a difference between a group for all the year 7 girls for example, and a chat for 4 or 5 friends. Its the first type that are being advised against.

Class chats are the worst. But normally it dies down after a couple of weeks when they all realise that it doesn't work and half of them left the chat.

We've been doing this learning curve since Christmas. DS has been booted off a second "class chat" for existing, and we talked about it and he seems happy not to bother trying to get on to another class chat, and stick to the smaller, more focused chats.

Another group chat lesson is "don't give away admin rights". The second "class chat" was set up by a sensible child but at some point, the admin rights were spread out and it was one of the usual suspects that started getting active on the "remove" button. If you spread out the admin rights and more divisive people gain control, you can't effectively manage the group any more.

TBH DS wasn't fussed, it was mainly 5-6 kids posting random memes and tik tok links. I'm happier that he's learning this in y6 than in y7 where everything is bigger and harder for parents to put out a warning if things are getting heated.

When DS1 moved up a couple of years ago, I liberally stashed spare pens around his school bag although credit to him, his autistic perfectionism has overriden his dyspraxic chaos traits