The Handbook of Transitions Big and Small: a review

The Handbook of Transitions Big and Small. Supporting children and young people to navigate change in education.

Louise Michelle Bombèr with additional commentary from Andrea Perry.
Worth Publishing Ltd 2026

In this book, Louise has drawn from her collected writings to bring together key passages which focus on supporting pupils with change and transitions in the school environment. This is presented within today’s context through additional annotations from Louise and Andrea. The sum of this is a helpful handbook to support educational staff with the many changes and transitions that they and their pupils face throughout the academic year.

The book is divided into three parts.

Part one helps the reader to understand the impact of trauma and disrupted attachments on pupils’ functioning within the school environment. This could make a depressing read, given the extent of the impact on a pupil’s functioning. However, Louise brings optimism, based on experience, that educators can make a difference to even the profoundly impacted pupil. As she writes: “Our biographies do not need to turn out to be our biologies” (p84).

Part two then dives deeper into the challenges presented by transitions and offers core principles for helping pupils manage these.

Finally, part three considers how beginnings and endings can be managed within transitions, big and small, including the planned and the unexpected.

A set of appendices brings in the modern context, including the impact of the pandemic, and offers a summary of key principles described in the book.

This collection brings Louise’s wisdom and experience to the specific focus on transitions. It focuses on the challenges presented to the pupils who have experienced developmental traumas and the challenges experienced by the adults supporting them. It encourages adult self-reflection noting it’s importance alongside reflection about the pupils. Encouragement for this is reinforced with the ideas for self-reflection provided throughout the book. There are also many testimonies from adults applying these principles, providing optimism that we can make a difference for pupils, combating the hopelessness that educators can experience when faced with the challenges the pupils present.

As with all her writings, this book highlights Louise’s strongly relational approach to supporting pupils in school.

“Tolerating uncertainty is often unbearable for many of these pupils, so what better gift could we give them than a human bridge at these times, to show that uncertainty can in fact be borne, and borne well.” (p76)

This is music to the ears of DDP practitioners. Louise recommends DDP and DDP PACE to provide a relationally, restorative, environment for traumatized pupils, although the book’s scope does not allow for an exploration of what this means in practice. Within DDP, we talk about the two hands of parenting/educating. This book’s focus is on the second hand, offering practical strategies that can be applied within the DDP framework. Educators coming to this book will need an understanding of the DDP model found in other books that Louise has co-authored (Bombèr & Hughes, 2013¹; Golding, Phillips & Bombèr, 2021²) if they are to combine their two hands into an approach for education.

Overall I found this a highly readable book containing Louise’s wealth of practical strategies focused on the theme of supporting pupils with transitions. This is a helpful addition to her library of books, bringing her ideas for this specific focus together in one place.

Kim S. Golding, CBE, Clinical Psychologist, DDP Trainer and author
August 2026

1. Bombèr, L. M. & Hughes, D. A. (2013) Settling to learn. Settling troubled pupils to learn: why relationships matter in school. Worth Publishing Ltd. ↩︎
2. Golding, K.S.; Phillips, S. & Bombѐr, L. M. (2021) Working with relational trauma in education. A practical guide to using Dyadic Developmental Practice with Educators. Jessica Kingsley Publishers ↩︎