Big School and other changes: Books that can help

Published on: 02 September 2024

Author and former Children's Laureate Anne Fine discusses how stories might soothe, reassure and suggest answers during worrying times.

The words sound simple enough: 'big school'. It's all too easy to forget how very intimidating the idea can be to a child of 11 or so. After all, they've worked their way up a safe and nurturing primary setting, gradually taking on more and more responsibility, often becoming more and more confident.

Then, suddenly, the realisation looms that they'll be joining all those older, taller, often more rambunctious teenagers they've so often seen walking along the same streets, vanishing through very different gates. Small wonder that a goodly number lose their nerve, becoming deeply anxious about what's about to happen.

Schools do their best, sending out all the information they think might be useful, offering open days, often inviting entire classes in for taster days. But the unknown, for so many children, remains deeply, deeply scary.

This demanding, often exhausting, period of what we have come to call 'transition' has always interested me. Children are such a mixed bunch – so very different in their temperaments and skills. How does it happen that every September so many young people, filtering in from different primary schools, and quite often losing some of their closest friends along the way, generally learn to bed down and fit in so well with a host of fresh faces to become a whole new year group?

In my new novel On the Wall, we gradually watch the process as it unfolds in Windfield School. We get to know Irina, the maths whizz with her head full of spinning motors, and Akeem, who's as jumpy as popcorn on a griddle. We begin to understand desperately anxious Juliet, beset by her exaggerated worries, and organised Cherry, so often dangerously on the verge of bossing even Mr Goodhew, the experienced and patient teacher of this new home class. We get to know all the others, as individual and varied as a pack of All Sorts.

And there, in the middle, sitting peaceably in classes, or perching silently on the wall around the recreation area, is Finley Tandy, the still centre of this endlessly whirling group. Almost all are somehow drawn to him in spite of themselves. Especially shyly observant Juliet, who not only finds herself comforted by Finley's seemingly impregnable contentment, but learns from him how to calm her own fears and look for simple and effective ways to deal with her worries.

Disquieting numbers of our children now suffer from things like deep anxiety and loneliness. For them, books can be a lifeline.

We do, after all, read partly to know that we are not alone, and reading about someone else's path out of an emotional mire so often offers a shaft of light, and a fresh notion of a way to go.

Books that could support children through transition

In his novel Worrybot, Simon Packham does a fine job of unpacking an anxious child's myriad ways of fretting about the things that might happen, and illuminates, in a fast and interesting story, many of the techniques that might help such a child.

Far too many young people find it all but impossible to make friends. They'll soon become addicts of Liz Meddings' graphic novel series The Sad Ghost Club. And a bonus will be finding real 'kindred spirits' on the growing, and hugely useful and comforting, website signalled by the series.

To me it's a wonder that so many of our young people haven't become halfway to nervous wrecks, the way they get the whole world's bad news blasted at them all day, every day. It must make their growing years little short of terrifying. So do them a favour. Get them a copy of Rashmi Sirdeshpande's Good News. It's fascinating, reassuring and confidence-boosting. She shows her readers, of the widest possible age range, both how to decode what they see and hear of what is going on in the world around them, and, most importantly of all, how to keep it all well in proportion.

But nothing works better for a fretting child than simply to lift them out of their stressful world into another. If they're exhausted after nursery, or finding life a little hard in primary school, soothe them and indulge yourself with Arnold Lobel's delicious and incomparable series of Frog and Toad books, in which two delightfully well-meaning amphibian friends deal with a host of the small worries and frustrations of life: ice-creams that melt too fast, lost buttons, a moon that seems to be following you home through the trees.

And the very same recipe helps just as well when they are older. So root out books by our new Waterstones Children's Laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce. In Framed, Dylan is dealing with huge changes in his home town of Manod, and great upheaval as his dad leaves home. But the artworks which are the hub of the story end up bringing the community together. Similarly, in Millions, the changes made by choices are very much a central theme, as Damian and Anthony have to decide together how to spend the money they discover.

These books may not be about the period of transition as such, but they are cheering and positive and perfect for this age group. You'll find their sheer unputdownable escapism will do the trick.

On the Wall by Anne Fine is out now, published by Old Barn Books.