Can we have a heated debate about ability setting in schools?

[pinksquidgy]

New education minister Nicky Morgan was rumoured to be considering making setting by ability a compulsory part of getting an 'outstanding' Ofsted classification. Caused a bit of a storm and now looks like she's rowing back.

When I heard this I thought 'I wish she bloody would'.

I know whole-class teaching/mixed groups are better for children who are struggling (for whatever reason) and I do get that that's important.

But I have two very bright DCs (i know, i know) and I cannot tell you how bloody sick I am of them being given things to colour in while the teacher gives most of her time to those who are at the lower end of the attainment range.

I'm guessing this is a result of the target culture - it seems to result in schools desperately scrabbling to get the 'D' student up to a 'C'. Students who were always going to be a B or an A just get left to stew and it's starting to drive me potty. (I do also realise this is partly a function of bad teaching and poor management - but that, unfortunately, is what our local primary is like.)

Don't clever kids matter too? Would it be so wrong to prioritise them just for once - maybe just for core subjects like numeracy and literacy?

My older DC has just gone up to secondary. EVERY single one of the 'clever' kids he started out with in infants (those who were getting similar SATS scores) has gone into the private sector or free schools, by hook or by crook. He is the ONLY one of his academic peers who has gone into a state comprehensive. This is the flipside of schools failing to look after clever kids: their parents simply opt out of the state system altogether - which is no good for anyone, surely?

I'm deeply committed to the ideal of comprehensive education in my heart (and in my wallet tbh) but once, just once, I'd like someone to think about what might work best for the children at the top end of the attainment range.

please don't kill me

I'd love to see this long accessible career list.

Could I add, not London based. So let's see the list for Cornwall, Cumbria, Lincolnshire..... not too long a list, I would have thought.

I wonder how many parents on this thread would

A) put their child's interests first, even when potentially detrimental to society's interests

B) put society's interests first, even if this was detrimental to their child

I'm in camp A

I would argue Gove and Cameron by picking state schools when they could afford better private schools are putting their children second and that that is morally wrong, whilst also in effect taking money from the mouths of the poor by hogging a state school place when they could well afford a private place. Shame on them and on the Blairs.

We could have afforded a private education ( although we may have needed to have two fewer children - we have six!) but chose a state education. I hardly think this counts as neglect. Most of ours so far could have got into the grammar - our decision to keep our daughters out of the system is not neglect!

I could do all sorts of immoral things in order to put my children first, but we don't because at times we all sometimes put the wider community before our own children.

I think the question of whether we should put our own children's or wider society's needs first is a false dichotomy. Personally I think the more moral approach is to try and do what's best for all children, not just my own (already very privileged) children. But even if you take the opposite view, that it's right to prioritise the needs of your own children, they don't exist in a bubble. To reprise the regular argument between Hak and Word, we need both to nurture our high flyers to ensure we have sufficient doctors, lawyers, etc, but also to ensure our lower attainers don't become disenfranchised and disruptive. Focusing on the short term needs of your own children at school, rather than trying to create a decent society for them to live in for the rest of their lives, seems very blinkered to me.

lavolcan people in Devon I know who pay school fees for multiple children include:

Academics
Accountants
Barristers
Solicitors
NHS management
Teachers
Builders (owners of their own firms not employees)
Software designers
Writers
Local government functionaries (high level)

What most of the people I'm thinking of have in common though is either they inherited at least one maybe two properties (typically in the south east) on the death of parents or they had previously owned and sold property in the south east - they all have either no mortgage or a very small one on their principle residence. A chunk of cash sitting in (non pension) investments or in the bank makes school funds more palatable than a high income with no capital and necessarily larger outgoings.

"With any discussion about ability settings I have noticed it is always the mums of "high attainers" who feel strongly pro-setting, and pro any selection, like grammar."
This is probably true. I believe if your dc is in top set then your dc is not affected and more likely to be benefited from being motivated and given more priority for better teaching and accessibility to more and fuller curriculum. It certainly is the case in my dc's primary school. Of course the school says it is to give the bottom set children more support but I am not convinced if the school has the same number of places in each set how will the bottom set children receive more attention than the other two sets. The parents also noticed that the school teachers’ kids are always placed in top set and get into local grammar schools 99% of the time. Only now when I look back in infant school years did I realised the reason why so many parents so desperate to push their kids to get into the top sets. These are usually the parents who know the grammar school culture very well.

vkyyu, as I say, I'm agnostic about setting, but I believe it is the norm these days for lower sets to be much smaller & also get extra TA support.

What most of the people I'm thinking of have in common though is either they inherited at least one maybe two properties (typically in the south east) ......... previously owned and sold property in the south east - they all have either no mortgage or a very small one on their principle residence. A chunk of cash .........

There you have it, not a long list of well-paid jobs in the poorer parts of the country. I know plenty of teachers, accountants etc. in Oxfordshire, which is not poor, (although has pockets of deprivation) who can't afford independent schools for their children. Typically now it seems to be the parents who only have the one child who can still afford them.

Genuine question here. Can I ask what differentiation looks like in a secondary school classroom? I see how this happens in Primary Schools - children are placed on different tables and there is often a TA who assists some children. The children are expected to complete different tasks depending on their abilities. I can't picture how that looks in a secondary school. At my secondary school, many years ago, everyone in the class followed the same work and was expected to complete the same work. What does good differentiation look like in a secondary school classroom?

If every parent put their own children's needs first, there would be no detriment to society.

It is in our own children's interests for them to have well educated and well motivated peers, and each of us getting the best education we possibly can for our own children is beneficial to society because society needs well educated people.

Differntiation can take many forms.

Usually my classes sat in tables of ability and were set tasks according to that ability, they could move themselves up and down tables or sometimes I would move them up and down.

My level 4 table would be focused on using key words and describing events,
My level 5 table would be focused on explaining why things happened and linking events together
My level 6 might be analysing sources and comparing different accounts.
and so on.

Sometimes I have a starter task which assesses their ability at something and then they choose a table which matches their current ability.

Sometimes I will set one task and give different learning objectives to match each level, they then choose the activity that they feel matches them.

If every parent put their own children's needs first, there would be no detriment to society.

A very interesting point and I quite agree.

"It is in our own children's interests for them to have well educated and well motivated peers, and each of us getting the best education we possibly can for our own children is beneficial to society because society needs well educated people."

It depends where that education is. If 'getting the best education for our children' involves them being physically removed from the presence / company / same building as those who are of very slightly different ability (e.g. the children with 0.5% less on a grammar school exam), then that is NOT beneficial to society as a whole, because those 'very near peers' suffer from the absence of 'our children'. It in fact prevents sopciety having the MAXIMUM NUMBER of well-educated people, because there will be many thousands of 'almost identically able' children who don't receive the education they need to be as well educated as they possibly can in a fully segregated education system (like e.g. Kent).

We know that statistically grammar school counties do slightly worse than similar, fully comprehensive counties. I suspect that that may be because the 'outliers' may do slightly better in a segregated system, but the 'slightly below the cut-off point' children do slightly worse in a segregated system, because of the absence of those children a tiny p[ercentage higher in overall ability. If our aim is for as many people as possible to be as well educated as possible - which is an obvious societal good - then we have to overcome that.

Are we talking about differentiation in the same classroom of mixed ability children or setting in different sets? Even the very academic top 10 secondaries in the private sector my children have been at have setting for some subjects. My daughter was bottom of 5 sets of maths in her school and got an A. One of my sons stuck in a lower set for maths because he liked the teachers and there was an element of choice and I was delighted he stayed with the teacher he was learning so much from.

I don't think it's fair to say that parents who live in fully selective areas are doing something detrimental to society by sending their children to the grammars.

Their children will be subject to a selective education no matter which school they go to, and parents can only work with what they have available.

I don't agree with systems like the one in Kent, but I am a big supporter of grammar schools. I have a child at one, but it's existence is in no way detrimental to any other children, or society, because it takes so few children from such a wide area. I also have a top set child at a local comp, and he is surrounded by many children who like him would not have suited the grammar school for whatever reason, despite being clever. The comp is good enough that parents choose it over private or grammar schools for various reasons, so the problem isn't grammar schools, it's fully selective systems.

Returning - I am in favour of flexible differentiation, and can see that by secondary some differentiation is most effectively achieved through flexible setting [in primary I am much less convinced, as children can develop so differently over a short space of time and setting is simply not flexible enough to respond]. I am not in favour of rigid 'streaming' - where e.g. a child able in English but with dyscalculia may end up in a wholly unsuitable stream - nor in the physical separation of children of different ability into different institutions (e.g. grammar / secondary modern), because those cannot respond quickly enough or flexibly enough to children's evolving needs and abilities. The only exceptions are at the absolute extremes - special schools and, possibly, special schools for those so able that they cannot be educated effectively in mainstream (those primary age mathematicians who need the A-level syllabus, for example). Even then, co-location with mainstream schools would work excellently to allow flexibility - said mathematician might benefit hugely from being with mixed ablity peers for other subjects, for example, in the same way as some special school pupils may benefit fropm some lessons in mainstream or using mainstream facilities.

People always talk about selective schools being bad for society yet the areas without them are not bastions of equality.

Social mobility has not improvrf since most grammar schools were abolished.

Why are we still waiting for the comprehensive system to deliver this?

It strikes me that the best way to encourage social mobility is top down. Get our brightest kids from non- privileged backgrounds into positions that will have an effect on a macro level!

Our current squeamishness about this is leaving a very clear path for the posh boys.

"Social mobility has not improvrf since most grammar schools were abolished."

There's very clear reasons for the apparent decline in social mobility since the 1970s as compared to the post war period, though, wordfactory.

From 1945 through to the mid/late 70s there was a massive expansion of the middle classes as the economy restructured and rebuilt post war. In practice, social mobility in that era meant children of working class parents filling these new middle class jobs. It didn't mean children of middle / upper class parents moving down the social scale (which would be true social mobility).

My mum was a grammar school kid from what would now be called a 'troubled family' in the early 50s (co-incidentally she went to the same school that Michael Gove's daughter now goes to). She says in each year there was a token black girl, a token Jewish girl, and a token girl from a bad area. They certainly weren't bastions of class-blind excellence, even back then.

LaVolcan all those people I mentioned are very well paid, but none of them except the barristers and the business owners (both of whom inherited/took over their business form their parents) are as well paid as I am (also an accountant) however earning an income that is statistically in the top 2% isn't necessarily sufficient to pay school fees for multiple kids if you have no capital. Unless, I suppose, you choose to live a NMW lifestyle which we don't. It is perfectly possible to earn a very good income in poor parts of the country but the focus on income ignores the fact that income is transient - capital is the differentiator.

Most people I know in the SE pay school fees out of income. I would say it was about 98% of the parents around here. We are too young to have inherited anything so inheritance plays not part and most people are self made.

If every parent put their own children's needs first, there would be no detriment to society.

I'm not sure about that. Some parents are in much better positions to make a difference. A wealthy parent who doesn't like their local school can choose to send their child there anyway and support both them and the school as best they can, or they can choose to move into the catchment of another school, or they can choose to pay for their child to go to a private school. A less wealthy parent may only be able to go for one of those options. Every parent putting their own child's need first doesn't necessarily lead to a fair society.

*Can anyone point to that middle + high achievers = good research?

I ask because as Prof. Becky apparently just discovered (see upstream post yesterday), there is 'surprisingly little' in this aspect of our education system: the most recent significant stuff is from last century undertaken by the IoE, an organisation which isn't perceived as neutral in this debate.

You can find more recent meta-analysis which is largely based on foreign bits and bobs, but people I trust who have looked at some of that stuff tend to say a lot is dodgy and biased in one direction or another.

I don't think we have any rigorous research.*

www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2008/wp187.pdf
and
www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp248.pdf

They're fairly weighty papers, but in essence the conclusion is that setting the lower ability pupils, but mixing middle and higher achievers is the optimum for getting best results.

phys.org/news/2010-12-brighter-pupils-bar-classmates.html
This is a good summary.