Visiting Macintyre last Wednesday, Liliana Connors and Emma Kennedy agreed that seeing the school grounds for themselves and meeting their future teachers had soothed their anxiety.

“I’ve already learnt something from just walking around the school today. I’ve learnt that there’s so many different rooms and that you can do different kinds of things and meet different people and you just walk in and sit down and learn,” Liliana said.

The fear of getting lost in the bigger school was diminished once they realised it was colour coded, and along with classmate Harry Edmonds, the pair were excited for the wider variety of subjects.

“I love how you get to do different things than just primary school, like woodwork, metalwork and art and science,” Liliana said, adding that she was looking forward to spending time in the sewing room.

“I’m more excited doing the ag,” Emma said. 

Harry said high school was what he expected and he was most looking forward to “Just being out of primary school!”

The trio joined their classmates in the woodworking room, where they learnt how to make a puzzle game with the guidance of teacher Ian McWhirter. In each visit students have a taste of different high school subjects, including metalwork, technical drawing and sport. 

“Originally it stemmed from the (fact that the) kids were quite scared coming into high school and they were only doing one and a half days transition,” Inverell Public assistant principal Ally Campbell said.

“It just gives them that one step ahead to get into high school. So if we can send them to high school as confident students who are not going to be overly nervous on the first day, it just makes everything better for everyone.

Formed three years ago by school principals Robyn Stewart and Lindsay Paul, the program has been hailed a success by parents and teachers.

“The feedback that we’re getting from the high school is that the children, they’re more settled, they’re more confident; they’re not having all of those little issues that they would have (otherwise) had,” Ally said. She said the feedback from the parents of a once very anxious group of year seven students was also very positive.

“Some of the children we thought would really do it tough on day one have breezed in, made new friendship groups – they’ve just settled into high school life really well.”