Any teachers here? Do mixed ability classes work?

DD has recently left a fantastic state school. Mixed ability classes have hopefully worked for her, but I will know for sure in a couple of weeks. She was put in sets for maths, English, MFL and sciences. The science sets determined who would take triple & double science, whereas MFL still has higher & foundation papers.

Her remaining subjects of history, geography and RS were in mixed ability classes. This meant she actually received more tailored attention in these as the teachers had to focus on individual targets rather than the blanket approach. Her teachers were great and really knew how to enthuse her. She's predicted top grades and these are unlikely to be jeopardised through sharing a class with less able students, only through the general lack of certainty about the examiner's approach to the new style GCSEs and minimal sample papers.

Another common denominator between Finland and Singapore is traditional teaching methods. Teaching in Finland has for years been quite traditional: textbook-led, plenty of teacher talk, whole class discussions led by the teacher, children working quietly on their own, desks facing the front from age 7, very little "group work".

Cognitive psychologists of learning like Dan Willingham argue that such more explicit teaching methods are key to improving the achievement of lower-attaining cohorts, for reasons to do with e.g. working memory limitations and less advantaged children needing more efficient learning techniques to enable them to catch up with what their advantaged peers have gained from home. It's possible that this is one reason why Finland has been successful with mixed ability classes.

These traditional methods are the opposite to what teacher training institutions in this country, and (until recently) Ofsted have been pushing, and to what goes on in a great many of our schools. A number of teachers are arguing for a more traditional teaching approach to become common here, but their voices are still in the minority.

Adopting approved used? Methods used

One common thing throughout this thread is doesn’t matter how MA pro the school is, Maths is always setted. Why is that?

I think this is starting to shift - although mixed ability maths classes at secondary school are rare, I know of a number of schools that have recently moved towards m/ab in maths. And if you go back 20 or 30 years, it was a lot more common than it is today.
In recent decades governments and Ofsted have put a lot of pressure on schools to set, and those that have resisted have found themselves ploughing an increasingly lonely furrow. However, in this world of International comparisons and countries striving to be among the 'best', we are looking to emulate the most successful countries, which typically involves adopting approved used in East Asian countries.... Of course, it is those elements of the E Asian approach that align most closely with the beliefs of those driving the policy that are the ones being pushed, but surely there's only so long that the Shanghai / Singapore method can be peddled as the solution to all our problems, before people start noticing that mixed ability grouping is standard in these places. Indeed, Finland, which is also up there amongst the highest performing countries, had an education system very different from those in E Asian countries, but the common denominator is mixed ability teaching.

I would say that mixed ability can work really well, but setting is more forgiving of bad teaching - there is often an assumption that all children in a set are at the same level, and teaching is often aimed at the middle of the group, with very little differentiation - but of course, in reality all classes are mixed ability, and many children in sets are disadvantaged in various ways - low expectations of those in lower sets, high pressure competitive environment in top sets, difficulty of moving up because you may not have covered the material that those in a higher set have, meaning that students can effectively have doors closed to them in year 7, regardless of what happens after that. The reality in many schools is that setting is primarily about appeasing m/c parents, and in often amounts to segregation by social class and / or behaviour (I have researched this, and seen countless of examples of schools going to ridiculous lengths to ensure that the children of the most 'persuasive' parents are in top sets and effectively segregated from the 'rougher' students. Awareness of pecking orders is heightened; those in lower sets know that they are less valued by the school, and those in higher sets believe themselves to be better (and are often told so by teachers).
Done well, mixed ability teaching can genuinely cater to the needs of all (including the highest attaining), and give students the chance to develop at their own rate with less focus all round on who is best / worst.

It seems to me that people have no problems teaching MA in Humanities subjects but not so much in Maths or Sciences.
So does that mean the question the op should be asking is “Do mixed abilities classes work in Humanities subjects?”

I suspect you know why, GHGN. It's because maths is presented as a series of problems to solve, requiring different skills and asking a teacher to have 20 different ability ranges all continually doing different work which is set at a challenging level for each of them would be impossible for any human being to achieve.

One common thing throughout this thread is doesn’t matter how MA pro the school is, Maths is always setted. Why is that?

lock not sure how many you know then! My DH works in a selective school which teaches in whole classes at primary until year 5 and then doesn't set for English or most option subjects throughout the secondary school. Highly successful day school.

The girls' school in oour town only sets at 11+ and again not in all subjects and the boys' day/boarding school only sets (apart from maths) at 13+ and only ina handful of subjects. No streaming in any of these schools.

I guess they don't feel a huge need to stream/ set when they have small class sizes in the option subjects and students have a narrow ability range.

Don’t be ridiculous. Every selective school I know still streams their pupils! There are degrees of brightness you know! To be over a certain level to be able to get into such a school doesn’t mean you already know it all on entry lol!

I'm well aware of that, but then don't understand your point when you say that it was a selective school. What was the relevance of that, exactly?

Lockhills,

Do you mean stream, or set?

Setting is where children who are e.g. great at Maths and less strong in English are placed flexibly in the appropriate group for that ability in that subject: so top Maths, middle English?

Streaming is where a child is placed according to their 'average ability across all subjects' - so the child in my first example is either in too high a stream to meet their true English needs, too low a stream to meet their Maths needs, or in some sort of halfway house limbo which meets neither need.

Streaming is not great educational practice, tbh.

Sadik Its hard to define, and the answer would be on a subject by subject basis, but for example, given that DS has now finished with English, I wish he could write an essay, or had ever written a short story. In maths, there are a lot of skills he has no knowledge of, some of them he'd have learned had he done additional maths (or whatever it's called) but the school doesn't do it.
Mainly though it feels like a lot of what he has learned has been like learning by PowerPoint i.e. missing out almost all the detail with GCSE approached as a series of sound bites.

As an example, DS2 (age 14) recently was in the car with me and he started to describe how the environmental and geographic conditions were ideal for a nation to thrive in Italy at the start of the Roman Empire. He went through it and I could see his understanding was really good. I thought he'd learned it at school and was impressed, thinking maybe things were changing. In terms of depth, it was certainly significantly better than DS1 had ever learned at the same school, even though he's done GCSE History. However, DS quickly corrected me - he'd learned it by reading an Andrew Marr book.

French2019

Don’t be ridiculous. Every selective school I know still streams their pupils! There are degrees of brightness you know! To be over a certain level to be able to get into such a school doesn’t mean you already know it all on entry lol!

Selective school.

But according to you, they were still streamed. Are you now saying that wasn't the case after all?

French2019 Selective school.

It’s up to parents to do the best for their own children.

mmzz - a bit off topic for the thread, but I'd ask what 'reaching your potential' really means at age 16/18. I'm wondering this because I think of the all the people I knew at university. We had wildly different A levels - I had friends who went to places like Winchester, others from Glumtown comp, and a sprinkling who'd come in as mature students mostly via unions/Ruskin college.

On the whole I'd say the only ones (amongst those I knew personally, obviously only a small sample) who I think really didn't make the most of the opportunities open to them were private school pupils who were clearly bright but had taken an easy clear pathway through O & A levels straight through to Cambridge. (And conversely, the mature students were a level above everyone else in terms of commitment and what they got out of their time at college, I'd say.)

Personally, having been to ye typical slightly dodgy 80s comp, I had no qualms about sending dd to similar and expecting her to take responsibility for her own learning to a certain extent.

Yep, worked very well for my very bright son

And what about those who it didn't work very well for? Those who were labelled at 4 as being less capable?

FWIW, mixed ability worked very well for my very bright dd at that age too.

And streaming at 4....?!!

Yep, worked very well for my very bright son who went on to be wanted by several fantastic preps (and all the perks that go with being sought after at 7!)

Schools which know they have a limited number of quality teachers who can deliver excellent progress have to decide how to deploy them - through mixed ability or setted teaching, but the bottom line is that if there aren't enough great teachers, not everyone will make excellent progress, no matter what system is used
This ^^
It's why our department is lucky to be fully staffed with strong staff.
Other departments I've worked in have had 3 subject specialists or have been 80% teachfirst (again not all specialists).

Setting is a problem because where do you allocate your strongest staff? To the top to stretch? To thr middle for value added? To the bottom to close the gap?

Mixed can be a problem if the mix is too big because it can be a pain to endlessly differentiate and keep the pace high. Fine if you're a strong teacher who can differentiate and stretch without death by task and worksheet, but harder for weaker staff.

I prefer loose sets, a half way house.

But aby system is limited by the quality od the teacher

There is a reason the very top prepreps stream from age 4! As I was told when looking around one, they aim for individual teaching in a social setting.

If they aim for individual teaching in a social setting, why on earth would they need to stream anyway? Sounds a bit like marketing-speak to me.

In any case, I think streaming - as opposed to setting - is the worst of all worlds. And streaming at 4....?!!

The mind boggles that people are willing to pay for this crap.

OP, The question you asked was, I think, is mixed ability the right model for a child like yours. I gave to admit to only skimming some if the replies, but I think the majority answers have been that MA benefits the bottom 80%\ 70%\ 50%\ 30%, often at the expense of the top 5%\ 10%/ 20%.

The implication of that (for me) is that it is the option to choose if you have a highly able child and want him to do the socially correct thing, even though it will disadvantage your child.

As DS1 went through secondary school, and was frequently complaining of boredom due to the slow pace and telling me how often he'd be told to spend the remainder of the lesson helping the person next to him, I'd ask about on MN and a significant number would always tell me that you haven't proved you understand something until you can teach it to someone else.
They'd also tell me how "able children will do well anywhere" - that's patently untrue unless their definition of "doing well" is different from mine (mine is reaching their potential) and doesn't include developing the mental illness of perfectionism.
They'd tell me that many children say they understand something but until they had proved mastery several times over, it was going to be assumed to be a false claim, which left me thinking but what if a particular child really has mastered these things long before the teacher assessed it as mastered (which tended to coincide with the end of the topic).

DS is expected to get all grade 8s and 9s next month. I know the school considers him someone to whom they've provided an excellent education, and sometimes that was true, but other times, it really wasn't. He wasted a lot of time.

I have no experience of the independent sector, and the grass is always greener but I can't help but think that the independent sector subdivides into differing levels of academic rigour and surely I could have found a school that was a better fit for DS if I'd had the foresight and the money.

There is a reason the very top prepreps stream from age 4! As I was told when looking around one, they aim for individual teaching in a social setting.

What could be better? It certainly beats giving everyone the same work and then helping the ones that are struggling, especially those who, with a bit of effort, could scrape a pass.

It gives better oversll results... that is they drag a few more passes out, but maybe at the expense of your child.

Would I, for my very able compliant DD, settle for a weaker teacher in this scenario? The truth is you'd have no choice but to make the best of it.

(Their progress results for EBacc subjects are higher than their overall average, and the progress even for the 'open' slot, is very good - these are all the subjects where mixed ability groupings are the norm)