Gail Bedford, headteacher at the Mountpleasant Primary School in Dudley, West Midlands, has been asked by Deryn Harvey, a director at the Innovation Unit, to co-ordinate the project. She is currently drawing together a group of people from settings around England who have already shown enthusiasm for the pioneering work carried out at the Dudley school.
Mrs Bedford said there would be representatives from a nursery, a nursery and infant school, and primary schools. The group will also include an advisory teacher working with ICT and an advisory teacher seconded to work with the Foundation Stage and transition.
'Some of the people are already involved in transition work, and others are expressing a real interest and want to do this work,' she added. 'But it is a management issue in schools, and a classroom teacher cannot make that decision themselves. They need their phase co-ordinator's co-operation or the headteacher's permission to do more than tweak the environment.'
With the full backing of her governing body, Mrs Bedford has transformed the Year One learning environment at Mountpleasant Primary.
She said, 'We have extended the philosophy of the six areas of learning from the Foundation Stage to Year One, which is not what we are guided to do by the Government.'
In May, Mrs Bedford organised an inaugural conference of the Primary Education Alliance that was attended by headteachers from around England who were concerned that children in Year One were being denied creative opportunities because of what they saw as the restrictive nature of the curriculum. The conference called for the scrapping of SATs at Key Stage 1.
Mr Harvey visited Mountpleasant Primary in January and offered to fund a day's non-contact time for each member of staff so they could reflect on their innovative practice. The results are being published in a booklet.
The Innovation Unit director then asked Mrs Bedford to co-ordinate the group to work on the transition issue.
The group will convene for the first time before half-term and then twice more during the academic year before submitting a report to the Innovation Unit next summer.