At the transition points within the education system decisions are made that are crucial for children and teenagers, but that also are a pedagogical challenge for teachers and parents. Therefore, this symposium will focus upon those transition points and comment on them from the perspectives of different research contexts within the educational sciences. Also we take the views of different educational stakeholders (students, parents, schools and their staff, ministries of education) in consideration.

Christiane Ruberg discusses the pedagogical challenges that arise for students, teachers and parents during transition points in the educational process from a perspective of the educational theory. With the help of transition-research she uses the example of the transition from primary school to secondary school to show the importance of the transition in the area of tension between the complex status passage and individual development impulse.

Bettina-Maria Gördel analyses the management of transitions within complex educational systems from the public governance perspective. From this perspective, to ensure smooth transitions in the education system proves to be a challenge for educational policy. Here, the research concept Educational Governance is used to analyze the problem of a goal oriented coordination of actions between different system levels and actors. Besides an overall view upon the German governance regime of transitions there is laid a focus on the field of regional governance. It is illustrated by the example of the transition from Kindergarten to primary school. By this, the following contributions are put into a broader context, as well.

With the help of photographs Ulrike Stadler-Altmann and Masashi Urabe illustrate the different ways of handling the school enrollment phase in Italy, Germany and Japan respectively. This comparative study demonstrates the culture contingent differentiated characteristics of school enrollment. Thus, the different expectations that are connected to school enrollment can be shown and the importance of it as the transition from a preschool to a school education system in the different countries can be considered. In the center of consideration are photographs of the first school day and within them embedded documented school culture. Thereby, the meaning of the transition within an institutionalized education process can be comparatively analyzed within its cultural horizon. There out, we can draw consequences about the cultural contingency of transitions into the educational system and name possibilities of pedagogical arrangement.

Susanne Schumacher outlines the means and boundaries of school support in the context of the transition from school into professional live with the aid of her research project BiKe. In her input the transition from school into professional career is examined. With help of the method of case analysis individual as well as general challenges of the entry into professional live will be pointed out.

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