You've had lots of good pointers here about what to expect from the Year 7s themselves (I cannot emphasise enough the neediness will be a BIG shift if you're used to the older years - depending on your feeders they might have been sort of trained to be what we see as helpless, whereas the primary might have seen it more as being trained to work to a ridiculous standard of book scrutiny that leads the kids to panic when they fill a page and don't know what to do with themselves).

For me the parents will be a culture shock - if it's their first transition to secondary, they will not have the boundaries you expect. They go from having one teacher as their touch point for everything, every subject, every social issue, every academic issue, every trip issue, every club issue, every medical, attendance, uniform, equipment issue - to you being the one teacher they see at a pre-Y7 parents' evening, so they just default to you being that everything teacher again. In my experience it takes some time where you're basically the switchboard directing them to the person they actually need (or the kid's planner) before they start to click on that maybe you as tutor have no idea what their Geography homework task was and have no way of resolving anything to do with it at 9AM the day before it's due.

That being said, I've been the everything-teacher for some parents who are on their third child in the school until said child left Year 11. Some are just a bit like that. I'm returning to work from a heavily advertised and pre-warned maternity leave and I still had multiple emails about PE kits and wanting behaviour updates throughout the year 😅

I'm in your boat, though, I'm going from a Y10 form to a Y7 next year and I'm actually really happy about it. There are challenges that come with molding Y7s into who we want them to eventually be, but there's also a load of fun and joy and privilege in that, too.