Isle Listen Easing the Secondary School Transition for Year 6 Pupils
July 3, 2025
Following the cancellation of 2025’s ‘Crucial Crew’ event for the Island’s year 6 pupils, local mental health charity Isle Listen has stepped in to ensure mental health education is not forgotten.
Crucial Crew is a national safety education initiative, aiming to prepare year 6 pupils for the years ahead, in secondary school and beyond. At this pivotal time, learning how to take care of yourself and others is essential. The event, taking place each May, usually comprises sessions from community partners such as the Police, St John Ambulance, and Coastguard, each with a different safety message. Isle Listen have attended Crucial Crew for the past 4 years, teaching methods of mental preparation for the move up to secondary school.
Keen to ensure this year’s year 6 pupils didn’t miss out, Isle Listen has created and begun delivering an engaging and meaningful ‘transition session’ to help students prepare for secondary school. The interactive session, designed to provide a hands-on lesson in prioritising life’s essentials, involves students filling a jar with three different sized items: rocks, pebbles and sand. Each item represents a different aspect of life: rocks represent the most important things (mental health, family, relationships, values). Pebbles represent the important, but non-essential aspects (hobbies, homework, social plans), and sand represents minor distractions (such as excessive screen time, or video games).
By demonstrating how to fill the jar in different orders, students saw that starting with the small things leaves no room for the big things—but if you prioritise the most important elements first, everything else can still fit in. During the sessions, the children are encouraged to top the jars with colourful beads, representing the simple joys and fun moments that make life vibrant and exciting.
“Starting high school is a big change—it brings new teachers, more homework, different subjects, and social adjustments. It can be exciting, but also overwhelming. If you focus on what truly matters, secondary school doesn’t have to be overwhelming—it can be a fun and fulfilling journey. At Isle Listen, we’re proud to support young people in building resilience and mental wellbeing skills that will last a lifetime.”
Kirsty Arnold, Schools Wellbeing Facilitator
“Our transition session aims to equip students with the tools to manage this change by learning how to prioritise what really matters. These sessions have provided year 6 students with a different perspective on the move to secondary school, while opening up conversations about various worries the children have about the transition.”
Speaking of the sessions, a spokesperson for one of the participating schools said: “Please pass on our thanks to…[the Isle Listen] team for having the foresight to provide an alternative for such an important event, especially now the original has [been] cancelled.”
A spokesperson from a different school added: “…[The children had] lots of opportunities to share their concerns and questions about [the] transition. Children felt heard and spoke to staff afterwards with confidence.”
Isle Listen is currently delivering this session to 24 of the Island’s primary schools, equating to approximately 700 pupils. To aid the transition further, Isle Listen has also created a free resource to help parents talk about the move to secondary school with their children.
Isle Listen relies solely on charitable funding to run the education programme, which delivers mental health education to just over 10,000 young people per year. You can donate here.