This page outlines our process and expectations for forming new classes and transitioning between one year and the next.

Students will have the opportunity to have two personal classroom visits to their next year’s class, connect with their new classmates, and learn about their new rooms. These visits are scheduled for Monday, November 25th, and Monday, December 2nd at 1:45 pm.  We have some very excited students moving into next year. Our teachers have also spent a great deal of time together discussing the transitioning students and planning for success at the start of 2025.

The process has come a long way since my time as a Pigeon Mountain parent- class lists for the coming year would be posted up in the reception windows a week or so before the start of the new academic year. We feel that it is now more supportive for students and families to make the transition process more personal and to allow children to know who their new teachers and classmates are well in advance. It also gives teachers a great opportunity to meet the students and spend some time looking ahead to the next year together.

Our class placement process is a long one. We gather a lot of data from teachers and then create draft lists. These lists go back to teams to see what the combinations look like. We then tweak and rework the lists until we have our final class placements. We think about children who work well together and those who don’t. We think about having a range of abilities for literacy and numeracy. We look at those who are introverted and those who are extraverted, the list goes on.

No doubt there will be children who may not have their best friend in their class. This happens! Where we mix students up, which mainly happens between years 3 and 4, we try to have children that are known to each other. We would never place students or form new classroom groups to leave them without peers with whom they have worked well with during 2024, or who they have identified as a friend on our ‘Hand of Friendship’. Our teachers are wonderful observers and judges of the relationships in their rooms, and we tap into this expertise when making up class lists.

We encourage you to be positive about the class placements with your children; they take their cue from you. If they don’t have their best friend in their class, reassure them! Tell them that everything will be ok and that they will have an opportunity to make many new friends in their new class. Tell them they will still get to play and hang out with their friends. Our children test our reaction to news to gauge how they should react, we need to be the reassurance they need. So be positive, reassure them and show them that you are confident that they will have a good year.

Other than administrative errors- children from the wrong year group appearing on a different class list etc, our class lists are final. If we have made an error of this nature, please let us know!
Any request for change will be met with a “let’s have a chat 6 weeks into next term.”

If you are desperately unhappy about the class placement do make a time to talk with your child’s classroom teacher before the end of term- they will be able to explain more about the process and give you reassurance about the new class and teacher.