Emotional nourishment begets academic coping during the primary to secondary school transition

Abstract The transition from primary to secondary school is widely viewed as the most demanding in a child's educational journey. Despite a wealth of research on this transition, little is known about the children's ‘lived experience’ of it across different contexts. We target this research void by drawing on semi‐structured individual interview data gathered from 24 children (aged 10–12), 12 of whom attend the final year of primary school and so are about to experience the transition, and 12 others who are in the early stages of secondary school and so are currently experiencing the transition. The findings demonstrate that despite holding a range of concerns and worries at primary school, children at secondary school were able to cope with the social, emotional and academic demands that the transition brings through the use of a range of adaptive coping strategies, and that often these abilities were grounded in, and stemmed from the ‘emotionally nourishing’ practices within the primary school they attended. The research contributes to existing knowledge in its demonstration of how the role of emotionally nourishing schools may facilitate the ability to cope with the transition from primary to secondary school.