How important is setting?

Re: "The setting is less important than the behaviour management, students can be in top set and still behave appallingly if not managed effectively. Second to that is friendship groups, bright kids can throw potential away in the wrong group."

I think this is true. I'll add:
In primary, the home environment is the most important variable in determining outcomes. But at secondary, this changes: the peer group becomes the most important factor (among other sources, I was told this by a very well regarded independent secondary school head, whose honest message was "yes, our teaching is good, but half of what you're paying for is the peer group".
Secondly, kids in the bottom set are a mixture of less academic kids who are trying their best, and extremely disruptive kids. As a result, the kids who would like to learn, can't. I've never seen research that adjusted for the effect of behaviour rather than just looking at ability/attainment. But the behaviour of a minority of students in the bottom set of a cohort is generally going to hold other kids back.
In most subjects I'd also rather have a top-notch teacher teaching an unset class than a mediocre or poor teacher teaching a class with a narrow ability range. Ultimately, they're teaching the same curriculum, assuming e.g. that it's higher tier GCSE. I've seen good teachers in e.g English, biology and chemistry give effective lessons to classes with wide ability range - the caveat being most of the kids were well behaved so time wasn't wasted on behaviour management.

Triple science is not harder than double it is more but different content, you can still sit both Foundation or Higher. Student do have to like science though and have an interest in it.

The school might also offer 'invite only' GCSEs that are only for the brightest like Further Maths. DD is doings hers one afternoon after school and it is taught remotely by the Head of Maths for the Academy Trust her school belongs too, with all students taking it from the Trust throughout the country on the same session if the schools don't have enough students to warrant a proper class.

If they offer triple science then they are in effect setting for science.

It's harder than double and most schools have some kind of system whereby only the higher attainers are allowed to choose it.

My school used to make people "apply" for it and then they were chosen whether to do it or not.

Triple science is its own subject and will be taught in an option block whilst other students do whatever their option is.

Also, what happens at the local schools now is not reflective of what will happen when your child starts there, bringing in a new head and leadership team can bring both swift positive or negative change.

Re setting.

In years 10 and 11 as students chose GCSEs it's quite rare for GCSEs that are not compulsory to be set.

So the compulsory GCSEs are maths, English lit and language and science (either double or triple)

The other GCSEs people choose, and they are usually put into option blocks.

So if for example twenty people choose German, they are the twenty people in your GCSE group and it will be mixed ability.

Most schools have some kind of pathways system to encourage students to do GCSEs that they are capable of. So high attaining students can choose what they want. Students who are lower attaining may have to drop a gcse (often languages) to do extra maths and English in that time.

So if your child chooses (for example) history German Spanish and Latin at GCSE they are likely to be in classes with middle to higher attainers at least for those options.

If they choose art, child development and btec PE they are likely to be with lower attainers.

What this means in practice is that even in completely mixed ability schools at gcse there is an element of separation due to choices made.

That having been said, mixed ability in science and maths is quite controversial. English less so as everyone sits the same gcse (there is no foundation/higher split) and students can access the same material at a different level which is much less the case in maths and science.

The setting is less important than the behaviour management, students can be in top set and still behave appallingly if not managed effectively. Second to that is friendship groups, bright kids can throw potential away in the wrong group.

It may have a low % 7-9 but they will have students with reading ages as low as 6 years and various SEND that make achieving higher than a 2-3 impossible they will have the full range of learning ability whereas any private school will have parents that excel and do well because they are in a position to afford the fees and therefore their children are more likely to be bright or at least value education as a family unit.

Go state and use the money you save on fees on tutors and cultural capital activities etc. it's not worth putting financial strain on the family when you don't have to.

This is just my own anecdata but I started secondary school nearish top of the class for English and really enjoying the subject but 3 years of mixed ability teaching put me right off and I was only average by year 10. However I was set for maths and stayed about the same with that subject. I learned to like reading again as an adult though.

There's not really an objectively correct answer to this, the empirical evidence, such as it is, is quite mixed, i.e. if you look hard enough you can easily find an ostensibly credible-looking study which says that attainment setting is absolutely essential/ruinously bad. By international standards UK schools use attainment setting quite a lot.

OP says that the school in question only sets for maths but as pointed out by a previous poster, I'm sure that later on they'll at a minimum do it for e.g. science, since some will be sitting 'double' science and others 'triple'.

My instinct has always been that MFL is one of the areas where setting is most important, because there tends to be quite a bit of speaking in pairs, in front of the class, and so on, which can get plain embarrassing if there's too wide a range of attainment levels.

My personal preference would be for setting for nothing in Y7 and setting for everything [other than possibly PE, tech, and whatnot] in Y8 onwards, but this view is by no means uniquely correct.

When you say that they only set for maths- do you mean in year 7? My kids weren’t set for say science in year 7 but there were science sets by GCSE. No sets for English is surprising.
I’m not surprised that other subjects aren’t set because most kids won’t have studied those subjects before year 7 (history, MFL etc) so I think it’s fair to assume that everyone is starting at the same place and not set until later.

the reasearch is interesting.

A good school can increase the outcome for a child by about 10%. The biggest influence for a child is home, the attitude to education, supportive of school and homework etc. So you could say that a good school can ONLY increase outcomes by 10%. But I know for my son, I wanted him in a peer group where it was cool to be clever, and our local comp was not that at all. He ended up at a grammar.

I find your school figures interesting - 40% at grades 7-9 seems a lot, if you think about the whole school being a reflection of the whole of society (and private schools aren't, they are selective, not necessarily academically, but certainly they select) then to have 40% achieving very high above average scores is amazing.

Setting has been shown to be bad for most kids, most kids apparently do better in a mixed class. The exception is the top 10% of kids who don't do better in a mixed set, I assume because they don't get pushed/stretched enough.
I find that really hard to believe though, and I would wonder if that research took into account behaviour and disruption which can be an issue.