Starting secondary school: what children worry about

Term starts in a couple of weeks and in most houses the Year 7 conversation has either already begun or is being carefully avoided. Some of what your child is feeling about it is ordinary and will pass on its own. Some of it is worth watching. The evidence base here is better than parents tend to realise: two large UK studies tracked thousands of children through this exact move and asked them, repeatedly, what they were worried about. Their answers shift over the year in a way that is worth knowing about in advance.

What children are actually worried about

The School Transition and Adjustment Research Study followed around 2,000 pupils in south east England across three assessment points: the last term of Year 6, the start of Year 7 and the end of Year 7 (Rice et al., 2015). Before the move, the top five concerns in order were getting lost, being bullied, discipline and detentions, homework, and losing old friends. By the beginning of Year 7 the order had reshuffled: losing old friends had moved to the top, followed by discipline and detentions, homework, getting lost and older children. By the end of Year 7, losing old friends was still the single biggest concern. The worry that dominates the whole first year is the one that barely registers in the summer holidays.

Losing old friends outranks making new ones

Parents and children in that study worried about broadly the same subjects, friendships and homework above all. The difference was in the direction. Parents were more worried about their child making new friends. Children were most worried about losing the ones they already had (Rice et al., 2015). The data sides with the children. From the end of primary school to the beginning of Year 7, only 38 per cent of pupils kept the same best friend, and that fell to 28 per cent by the end of Year 7. Around a third kept none of their top three friends: 28 per cent at the start of Year 7, rising to 38 per cent by the end. The pattern was the same for boys and girls. Children whose friendships did stay stable did better academically, had lower rates of conduct problems and higher rates of prosocial behaviour, and the effect was stronger for keeping a single closest friend than for keeping any of the top three. So "have you made any new friends?" answers a question your child is not asking. "Who did you sit with at lunch?" gets closer to it.

Different worries fade at different speeds

The reassuring headline is that concerns do reduce once children start. The useful detail is that they reduce unevenly (Rice, Frederickson, & Seymour, 2011; Rice et al., 2015). Worry about getting lost disappears during the first term. Worry about being bullied drops during the first term and then re-emerges by the end of Year 7. Concerns about homework, about discipline and detentions, and about losing old friends do not come down until the end of Year 7 at the earliest. A child still tense about homework in February is on the normal curve, not behind it. The wider picture is similarly steady: in a national survey of 550 children and 569 parents across six local authorities, 84 per cent of children said they felt prepared on entry to secondary school, and a term after starting, only 3 per cent were still worried or nervous (Evangelou et al., 2008).

Bullying is what turns a wobble into a bad year

In the same national survey, around three in every ten children had some or many experiences of bullying according to their parents. Of the 165 parents who reported problems with bullying, 72 per cent of those children did not settle well and were of particular concern to their parents, 66 per cent did not get used to the new routines easily, and 63 per cent did not expand their friendships or gain confidence and self-esteem over the year (Evangelou et al., 2008). Of everything measured, bullying was the clearest single inhibitor of a successful transition. It is also the one thing on this list that a school can act on directly, which is worth remembering before deciding a report is not worth making.

Children with SEN and neurodivergent children

Overall, children with special educational needs did not have a less successful transition than other children in the national survey, which surprised the researchers as much as it surprises most parents. Two specific findings sat underneath that. Children with SEN were more likely to be bullied: of the 110 children with SEN in the sample, 37 per cent had problems with bullying, against 25 per cent of children without SEN. They also experienced greater curriculum continuity between Years 6 and 7, possibly because their transfer process starts earlier and is handled more individually (Evangelou et al., 2008). The evidence for neurodivergent children specifically is thinner. A recent study followed 61 parents of autistic children and children with Down syndrome or Williams syndrome across the move, interviewing the children as well. Overall parent-reported anxiety did not change significantly from before to after the transition, though the variation between individual children was wide and different factors predicted anxiety before and after. Both children and parents named bullying and adjusting to a new environment as their main concerns (Sideropoulos et al., 2025). With a sample that size, the honest reading is that there is no single neurodivergent transition story. That matches what the larger studies found for children in general: no one group reliably struggles, but individual children do.

What parents can do that measurably helps

The transition study looked at this directly and found something more specific than "talk to your child." Where parents and children agreed about what they were worried about, children reported lower concerns once they had started secondary school. There was one exception, and it is the important one. When parents themselves were very worried, that agreement no longer predicted a better transition, and children whose parents had high levels of concern settled in less well academically (Rice et al., 2015). The useful version of this conversation is your child describing their worries and you listening. The unhelpful version is your worry becoming theirs. If the move is making you anxious, that is worth talking through with another adult rather than with your eleven year old. On the practical side, homework is both the concern that stays high the longest and the one most within your reach: check the homework diary, make sure they have actually understood what was set before they sit down to it, and get them starting earlier than feels necessary. The study also found that parental warmth, meaning ordinary expressions of affection and support, had a lasting influence on children's self-control, which in turn predicted how well they did at secondary school academically and behaviourally. Hostility and disciplinary style affected self-control too, but those effects faded with time. Warmth was the part that lasted.

When settling in has stopped being settling in

The thing to watch is not how distressed your child is in the first week. It is the direction of travel by October half term. A child who was anxious in September and is noticeably less anxious by late October is on the expected path. A child who was coping in September and is worse by half term, or who is at the same level of distress in November as on day one, is not. Specific signals worth acting on rather than waiting out: resisting or refusing school on more than the occasional morning, physical symptoms on school mornings that clear at weekends, withdrawal from friendships they still had in July, sleep that goes and does not come back, a drop in mood that holds for more than two or three weeks, or anything self-harming. There is a reason not to let this run. Following the same cohort, researchers found that depressive symptoms, lower school liking and conduct problems at the start of Year 7 predicted lower attainment by the end of it, after accounting for how the children had been doing beforehand, and the effect of depressive symptoms on later attainment was stronger for boys (Riglin, Frederickson, Shelton, & Rice, 2013). Low mood in the first term of secondary school does not only cost a child their mood.

Blip is a specialist mental health service for children and young people aged 7 to 25. If your child's start at secondary school has gone badly and you are not sure whether what you are seeing is settling in or something that needs looking at properly, get in touch and one of our clinicians will talk it through with you.