How important is setting?

I think this also says a lot about why private benefits those in middle and lower sets too. They may be less attentive but you won't get the "feral" aspect in any even mildly selective private school. I think it is often overlooked these days how much children are pulled down by kids who are not being helped with emotional regulation in state schools. Tories and CAHMs have a lot to answer for.

I wouldn't worry about the VAT aspect yet. I think Labour are going to struggle to get in before Sept (Tories seem to be holding on for October) and they're unlikely to start it mid way through a year. They also have said some SEN children may be exempt, from what I hear. I don't think it will be a quick thing for them to put through and schools are thinking up ways to help parents who may struggle. Do remember though that the fees rise appx 5-7% annually with most private schools, regardless of VAT.

What's the proportion of low/medium/high achievers? And how does this compare to national average?

I think last year's results need to be viewed in a slightly open minded way. The cohort would have been in Year 8/9 in the Covid years which are the ones arguably got the short straw of secondary school provision where schools struggled. Might be worth a chat with the school about what they feel about their results.

I think you found a highly relevant piece of info there. Our school is neg P8 for low attainers (which includes most of our non-attenders), neutral for middle, and +1.5 or so for higher attainers. (Make of that what you will!)

No setting except for maths.

Forget the % of grade breakdowns as that could just be representative of the cohorts ability

The P8 score is very relevant though despite how many MN think year 6 SATS are pointless. Now you could be in luck and the school could get inspected and pulled up on this data and then they will focus on it. Or they could just coast. 9s are equal to A** so it's not unusual for only one or two students to get them in a bog standard comp, 21% getting 7s or above would mean perhaps one top class worth of high achievers

"The p8 score was positive for middle ability kids and negative for high ability based on the ks2 results."

I would be inclined to view that as highly relevant information.

I know it can be hard to decide where to send a child to secondary school. If a school has a good principal, is strict, has good pastoral care and good exam results I think it will enable a child to achieve the best results possible for them.
Also stand outside near the school and see what the pupils are like coming out and see how they manage the pupils then.

One of my friends had a poor secondary school near her and she decided she did want her children to go their. The kids were let away with poor behaviour and the results were not good. The extra circular activities and subject choices were poor also.
She got her child into an accedemic school with good extra circular activities that was strict re uniforms, behaviour, absents and kept in contact with parents.
Most of the parents sending their kids to here were educated with good jobs and wanted the same for their kid's.

I would keep an eye on who their friends are. If your child is friendly with other kids who are talking about going to university, want to get good exam results it will encourage your child to want the same.
I know 2 lads that were friendly in primary school and they both went to the same secondary school. One of the lads became friendly with lads who wanted to do well in school and some wanted to go to university. The other lad started to become friends with lads who had very little interest in school. The 1st lad is now finished his 2nd year in university in a good degree.
The other lad is in a min wage job that has no long term prospects re earnings or moving up the ladder and he was good in school.

EEF have a summary document on setting on their website - it accords either the research I have seen that the impact of setting on lower ability students is negative and the impact on higher attaining students is positive.

educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/setting-and-streaming#:~:text=Impact%20for%20pupils%20with%20high%20prior%20attainment&text=The%20average%20impact%20of%20setting,effects%20do%20vary%20between%20studies.

So logically if your kids are bright and you want the best for them you should choose sets.

So, the research.

Firstly setting is not a simple word and it can mean different things in different countries.

The research generally distinguishes between three possibilities

1 streaming. This is what used to happen in some schools in the UK in the 60s/70s. You would do an intelligence test. You would then be put into a "stream" based on the test. So you might get put in top stream even if you can't do languages for toffee.

The research shows that this is not an effective way of teaching, largely because it's the worst of both mixed ability and setting. You have a top stream of largely intelligent kids, but some of whom have difficulties with specific subjects - maths, languages, whatever. The lower streams feel like failures and stop trying and you get behaviour difficulties.

Streaming is very rarely used anywhere these days.

2 mixed ability. This generally refers to a lack of selection on academic ability within the particular school. So for example you often get grammar schools which have mixed ability classes but for obvious reasons the ability range in a grammar is mostly only very bright children anyway.

True mixed ability where the whole range of ability is included within a single class is actually quite rare anywhere in the world as most students who are very low ability go to special schools and are not in mainstream.

Within secondary schools in the U.K. there has been a movement towards mixed ability recently for a whole number of reasons. I'm a maths teacher and I have been involved in advising a number of schools on this.

Within maths true mixed ability is very very hard to teach. In most secondary schools the ability range in maths goes from "can't count to 10" and has an EHCP up to "is doing Olympiad problems for fun".

Of the schools I have been involved with that have moved towards mixed ability teaching the most common model is to pull two groups off - a nurture group for the lower attainers which teaches towards the entry level qualification (below gcse) and an express group for the Olympiad types and then mixed ability for everyone else.

3 setting. This refers to the practice of grouping students by academic attainment.

Research on setting shows that
a) students are very rarely put into groups based on just academic attainment. The groups are also based on behaviour (you can't put X with Y they have a restraining order), special needs/disabilities (X is in a wheelchair so needs a ground floor room he'll have to go with teacher Y even though it's not the right group) and also, bluntly, teacher bias. There's extensive research showing BAME kids are more likely to feel in the wrong (lower) set from their attainment etc (this is U.K. research but teacher bias applies the world over).

b) setting impacts how well students do largely through the social impact of the expectations it sets for them. There is so much research showing kids in sets know exactly which set they are in and often can rank their set by attainment pretty accurately. Kids that are in bottom set know they are in bottom set and either want to get out of it and try hard or give up and don't work.

For example this study www.blatchingtonmill.org.uk/assets/Uploads/The-impact-of-tracking-by-attainment-on-pupil-self-confidence-over-time-demonstrating-the-accumulative-impact-of-self-fulfilling-prophecy.pdf
(Please not it refers to setting as tracking which is the internationally used word for setting as setting is both U.K. specific and ambiguous)

I don't think things are as clear cut as stating that setting makes all the difference. There are school elements, teachers, behavioural management, peers and then there are home elements, parental involvement, study environment and then there is the child themselves, motivated all the way through to lazy. It is complicated.

Certain fee paying schools will drop a child from sitting a GCSE on their books but still enter them as a private pupil so as not to upset their league tables and results. That means the child still gets X number of GCSEs but some or all might be recorded for the school.

Fee paying schools are also not equal in terms of results and it depends what access you have locally. I personally think a private tutor for one to one is better than a blanket fee paying school is better.

My youngest child is year 13, what helped our children to be successful academically was a combination of everything I mentioned above. A great state school, fantastic pastoral and no tolerance behavioural policy, great friendship group of academically able and motivated students, supportive, involved parents and a home that valued education and we widened their knowledge from day 1 in secondary for a bigger picture of what they were studying.

The school set for maths, English and science from year 7 everything else was mixed ability.

I think that "pretty much all research" is a huge exaggeration. Don't forget that someone has to pay for "research", the money could come from an academic research council but in answering that question is probably likelier to come from a vested interest.

e.g. see this data from Ireland, which is useful because single sex state schools are so popular there - single sex schools do indeed do much better, but when you control for prior attainment the difference fizzles away to very little.

https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/berj.3841

it depends on the time scale and on what you mean by "doing better".
Girls get slightly better academic results on leaving school if attending single-sex, whereas boys get slightly better academic results on leaving school in co-ed.
But if you follow-up much later, both sexes, if they have attended single-sex schools, have a higher divorce rate than those who attended co-ed schools, and also have higher rates of social adjustment problems. Single-sex education is not good preparation for living in a mixed-sex world, which is why most other countries won't countenance it, unless they're run by religious crackpots.

This is true. What the research usually doesn’t consider are the adverse effects of all-girls’ schools (eg eating disorders). I would like to know the answer re: setting. I suspect that for most kids the quality of teaching and behaviour is most important, but the brightest kids would still benefit from setting even with these factors optimised.

We don’t set at my school apart from maths - wonder if it is the same one!

@steppemum
pretty much all research, not restricted to country or school (private v state) say girls perform better in a single sex setting and boys perform better in mixed. That's why I was so interested.

@steppemum thanks.
MN is such an education!

• not even bothering...

I don't think it's "all research". I know that there is some research. I think that some of it was commissioned by chains of private girls' schools in the UK & Australia. It may well be right that girls do better in all-girls' schools on balance, but I seem to remember skim-reading the odd bit of some of the research & detecting a whiff of bias, e.g. going hard on the question 'are some quieter girls intimidated by the presence of loudly high-achieving boys in their STEM classes' but even bothering to test whether, say, some quieter girls are intimidated by the presence of loudly high-achieving girls in their STEM classes.

DC goes to a high performing state school and we have stats from 2023 for all subjects. Is the stats for 7+ for all subjects or average? DC school I can see varies a lot across subjects, I would say 40% at 7+ is pretty good.

For all likelihood it's a different school but I'll try to explain how it works. The school sets for maths in Year 7 but not for any other subjects. The kids don't know what set they are in. When DC1 join, we were told they were taught in tutor groups but in Year 8, DC1 is no longer taught with her tutor group but instead of a tutor session once a week. They mixed all the children up and I have no idea how the timetabling works if it's not by sets.

Science is like you say that triple science is the higher set and double the lower. They are timetabled for the same number of lessons so triple are taught at a faster pace.

If you can pay for private, what's holding you back?

Depends on the school. At my DC's school it's only a very small number of students that are not allowed to take triple science.
Personally I'd want to avoid a school with rigid requirements for triple science if I had a child who was interested in science.

I did not mention single sex schools at all?
The question is about setting for ability not sex?

But yes I have also heard that single sex is better for girls and mixed for boys.

I do find it all interesting though, as I completely agree with PP who said behaviour management is key, and I don't know how much the research reflects that. (and it may vary enormously from teacher to teacher.)

I also agree with the peer group comment.
The 10% figure is really about the effect of the school, which doesn't include peer group. It was peer group that made us go down the grammar and travel to next town route.
being cool to be clever, as opposed to hiding your cleverness. Being amongst kids who have ambition and aiming for professions and university is quite important for unmotivated kids who need that peer group 'normality'

My DC's school only sets in maths (and science from Year 10).
Nearby school, with similar profile of intake sets in every subject from day 1.

Results virtually identical.

Good teaching is a lot more important than sets. And there are lots of downsides to sets - setting for children with spiky profiles doesn't always work too well, for example, and children can have limits set on what they can achieve based on the set they are in. A quick perusal of MN will also tell you how many schools aren't that great at moving students between sets in a timely manner.

@steppemum
Is this correct as I thought all research indicated that girls overperformed dramatically in a single sex setting?
Boys do better in mixed.
Please advise where you read this as I would be really interested thank you😊