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

If we are talking about politics, education isn't enough. Oxbridge isn't enough. You need to be able to "afford" to risk a pause in your career and take the gamble of elections to have a chance. If you have a wealthy background you are more likely to take the risk of elections than if you are from a council estate.

There is a huge amount more than just education to get "normal" people into political or influential positions.

I'm all for grammar schools, super-charging comprehensive schools, giving credit to bright kids from less well-off backgrounds etc, but it just isn't going to change the nature of the political class nor of the FTSE 100 CEOs.

If you have wealth you can afford greater risk and greater loss so, on average, are likely to be better represented at the higher levels.

My solutions to politics is simple. If you want to be a public servant, you give up the right to private options (education, healthcare, etc) and you also give up the right to a private income for the rest of your life. However, once you've done your time, you get a decent "over the odds" salary for the rest of your life. That way, you can never be bought by a corporations promises of a Tony Blair lifestyle post-office and it would be highly attractive to those without wealth.

@LilyBolero, thanks for the links and I'll get around to the papers by-and-by. In the mean-time I wonder if it's essentially saying what I've seen a bit in the last year or two: teach to the top of the class not the middle (within reason if there are serious outliers).

If you have mixed ability teaching, surely the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator . The teacher will structure the class for the C/D students rather than A*/B students. That is pretty obvious, that's why I can't see why there is any doubt about setting, selection or streaming. The questioning of whether children should be set, goes back to the 1970s with progressive ideas of education, intimating that every child was equal in ability regardless of potential grades.

I honestly thought we had moved away from questioning whether setting was 'fair' and the appropriate way to educate children . The only way as I have said repeatedly is to educate children with their own academic peers, this is particularly important for bright but 'poor' children.

Takver the superselective my DDs attend is neither in a large town nor a city. And it's more than 30 miles away from a teeny tiny city.

smokepole I prefer teaching set classes, so I am not one to defend mixed ability where there are not grounds.

However all classrooms are to a certain extent mixed ability although of course it is easier to teach a class where they are all aiming for very similar grades.

Many smaller option subjects will be mixed ability because of the way options and timetabling works. Many of our smaller option subjects gets some of our best grades - although that is partly because the students are in smaller groups and studying a subject they have chosen so perhaps not a fair comparison with younger students with no real choice over what they are studying.

A teacher should never be teaching to the lowest denominator and in a mixed ability lesson there will be probably be about three layers of work going on, all with different starting and ending points. I wonder whether this is a sensible use of school hours and working hours is a big issue.

Although I guess that all of those activities would need planning so maybe there is not extra planning, but running them all in one lesson adds a lot of pressure akin to spinning lots of plates at once.

Not a sarky question, but where do they get the numbers of pupils from, Rabbit ? I admit our area is an extreme, but we have one (small) secondary school 7 miles away, and another 12 miles away, the next nearest after that is 40 miles +

In fact, my problem with dd's current school is that there isn't really a large enough population of pupils as it is, so for example they can only offer one language, & teachers have to double up some subjects.

"If you have mixed ability teaching, surely the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator . The teacher will structure the class for the C/D students rather than A*/B students"

No they don't. That's what people who aren't teachers think they do, and why people who aren't teachers think mixed ability teaching is impossible. As I said before, the way we regard teachers is very odd. Teaching is the only profession everybody thinks they could do. You don't look at a com point fracture and think "well, I couldn't pin that and stitch it up, so it must be impossible" do you?

Innate ablity is only part of what makes a child sucessful. Moviation is an important factor. A low ablity child can achieve good GCSEs if they are prepared to work hard and are taught effectively.

My son has been teaching himself German with Duolinguo and his andriod tablet. He is mastering verbs which his teacher believes are far too challenging. He is using technology to cut through the ceiling that his school has placed on his learning.

Teachers often underestimate children's ablity. The problem with sink sets is that the children know that the school has low expectations of them. Often low sets have bright, but lazy children in them. Boys in particular can be very immature about doing homework or revising. Sadly bad decisions at eleven or twelve can have a huge impact on a child's education. Once they are are in the dustbin set it is very hard to get out of. Lack of challenge and boredom in the bottom set is a common reason for poor behaviour.

"A teacher should never be teaching to the lowest denominator and in a mixed ability lesson there will be probably be about three layers of work going on, all with different starting and ending points. I wonder whether this is a sensible use of school hours and working hours is a big issue."

If a teacher is not prepared to differentiate a class with at least three layers then they deserve to be kicked out of the profession. Even highly setted groups have a range of ablities. Children should not be put in sets to make lesson planning easier.

I feel that we need more research into effective ways of providing differentiation within the classroom. I believe Duolinguo and similar software could be used in schools to accelerate gifted lingists as well as give support to low ablity children.

Takver - they come from all over. The school population comes from an area the radius of which is about 50 miles. Kids there from 3 different counties. It's quite small though, 4 form entry.

"If you have mixed ability teaching, surely the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator . The teacher will structure the class for the C/D students rather than A*/B students. That is pretty obvious,"

I start planning from what I expect the top children to be able to do. Then I think about what support other children might need to be able to attain the same - whether that be person (me or a TA), some scaffolding (e.g. a vocabulary list, a step by step frame) or some intermediate steps (e.g. do this for 2 digit numbers, then 3 digit, finally 4 digit).

The point is, that the ezxpectation for a lesson is that every child should make progress. I can't say 'oh, the able will take care iof themselves' - that's the way to fail any observation / Ofsted you care to name. I personally find planning from the top down easiest, others plan from the bottom up - but every teacher will look at what each subgroup within the class needs in order to progress, and plan how they will do it. That's the job.

Children should not be put in sets to make lesson planning easier.

I agree to an extent but when I was a teacher you were paying for my time, you were only going to get so much of my time. Therefore if you could achieve the same results and use less of my time it freed me up to do other things.

"I agree to an extent but when I was a teacher you were paying for my time, you were only going to get so much of my time. Therefore if you could achieve the same results and use less of my time it freed me up to do other things.2

Does setting achieve the same results for less work? Does setting result in more or less children achieving their potential? What is potential? Educational research is full of unexpected surprises. I feel that educational policy needs to be research based rather than politics/chrisma based.

This article is interesting. I find it surprising that a computer programme used for 30 minutes a day can produce better results than a teacher in the UK.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29065363

I believe that some holy cows could be slaughtered by proper educational research.

I totally agree that education should be research based, I do not know what the research says on the matter, which is quite a shocking thing to admit.

agree wholeheartedly op

The problem is that there appears to be research to suit every ideology (some of which belong to commercial interests). Few seem to care about quality, replication, if it supports their view.

No one could nowadays imagine medicine not being evidence based. Last century there were doctors who felt that medicine was far too complex for randomised trials to be suitable. The stastical research techniques used in medicine could really help to improve education. Medicine has more issues with commerical interests than education, yet proper statistical analysis still makes a difference.

www.badscience.net/2013/03/heres-my-paper-on-evidence-and-teaching-for-the-education-minister/

Evidence based practice would improve the lives of teachers as they would not be subjected to the whims of the latest political party. At the moment if labour wins the next election then teachers will be faced with a barrage of more "reforms".

The secretary of health does not tell doctors how to do their jobs. Why should the secretary of education attempt to micromanage schools?

Healthcare is seriously and frequently interfered with by heath ministers!

Not at the level of telling surgeons how to operate (or at least not in great detail), but in totally disruptive ways nonetheless. Any public sector service is bound to have a high level of short term orientated political dabbling, it's part and parcel of being in the public sector.

Whilst I think it is true that Government ministers don't tell doctors or teachers how to do their jobs, they do

a) set targets
b) set funding of budgets

So, whilst the government might not tell a doctor how to treat a patient, they have told them to cut their budget by 10% every year for the last 5-7 years whilst ensuring quality is improving and waiting lists falling.

The effect of this is not to "improve" services or "empower" doctors or teachers - it's simply to spend less. In doing so, public services are falling apart.

Sorry, feeling a bit grumpy on a Monday morning.

Have been thinking about this thread overnight.

I think there are obviously positives and negatives to setting. The positives are that it's inevitable that some children will be more able than others, and it does reach a point where you are teaching fundamentally different work, and normal classroom differentation is just not possible. (at Ks2 this might be seen best when comparing work done by a group of children working towards L4 with a group of children working at L6). This is more pronounced at secondary.

The negatives are that the children in lower sets may feel discouraged, and 'thick', and children at the edges of the sets may be put into sets to make the numbers work, rather than purely on ability (and I know this does happen). If a parent or child is not very clued up about sets and not in contact with the school, this could have long lasting effects. Also, the children in the mid range will lose the benefits of being with the more able children (which statistically pulls them up too).

So it's a case of balancing the good with the bad. And certainly if you start making decisions about other subjects based on, say, maths ability, you're going to let some children down.

If you're going to have sets, they should be purely ability based, even if that means the top set is huge, they should be fluid, with the possibility of moving between the sets (and in subjects where the top set may be doing different material, if a teacher feels a child should be in the top set, then perhaps the teacher needs to make up the ground lost with the child), and lower ability sets should be very carefully handled, with a lot of thought as to how the child feels being in that set.

At primary, there are often reading groups, and this has 2 bad effects that I can see - firstly that parents can be very competitive about which group their child is in (and everyone knows which is the top group, whatever creative name it's given!), but also, being in the bottom group, especially for summer born children, and often particularly summer born boys, can reinforce the idea that they are stupid, when they are just young and not really ready for school at all. I would totally advocate having 'extended playgroup' (which could be all day, and mirror the school day), but didn't do much reading/writing/sums, but more running around, creative play, drama, music, sport, to avoid losing the less ready children right at the start.

In Canada and other countries they do this, by age 11 they've overtaken the English children. Not rocket science to see that starting earlier doesn't actually equate to better results.

Possibly (to be fair) some of us think teachers pitch to the LCD some/most/all of the time because that is what we have experienced.

ReallyTired : Duolingo is great, but unfortunately does not really fit in with what exam boards expect us MFL teachers to teach - i.e. a child who does extremely well on Duolingo could not expect to get an A* at GCSE. It's an excellent revision tool though.

Frankly the problem with education is so much bigger than ability setting. The British class system is alive and well and the education system reflects that. It's a vicious circle. Parents look at the league tables to find the best school for their child. Schools want to be at the top of the league tables so teachers are made to teach to the test. Subjects therefore become less and less relevant to real life and more difficult to teach in an engaging way, especially in a mixed-ability group. In MFL, what I need to teach to C-grade students and to A-grade students can be very different, e.g. A-grade students need to be able to manipulate 8-9 tenses, C-grade students only need about 4. I would much rather cut down on all the unnecessary grammar (not sure why a 15-year old British student needs to know the French pluperfect) and teach students what they need to understand, speak and write simple French (which I could do in mixed-ability groups), but unfortunately that's not "measurable" enough for exam boards.

Parents - wanting a string of As and A*s for your child (so that they get into the BEST unis!!) comes at a cost. I don't know what the solution is.

rubyinthedust Do you think that Duolingo could get a child out of a bottom year 8 set? My aspiration is that my son should at least get the chance to attempt a GCSE german course.

I don't expect Dulingo to get my son to A* star standard. I hoping it will get him out of the rubbish dump set into the middle set where he might stand some chance of having a proper language lesson rather than colouring.

I'm shocked that anyone in secondary school is being asked to "colouring." That sounds insulting to me.

(Sorry about hijacking the thread, just putting this here in case it's useful for anyone else!)

ReallyTired It could certainly help, but some units will be more helpful than others. In a nutshell, to pass a GCSE in MFL, a child must be able to write a text of at least 200 words in a foreign language, using at least 3 different tenses (past, present and future). The texts could be about a variety of topics, like holidays, future plans, sports and hobbies, healthy living, media and culture... Obviously, there are Speaking, Listening and Reading units too, but it's easiest to explain what the criteria are for Writing.

A good website for vocabulary learning that fits in with what the exam boards are asking for is www.linguascope.com , it requires a username and password though, it's very likely that your son's school would have one. A good website for grammar/tenses is www.languagesonline.org.uk (no username/password needed). Duolingo would be great for reinforcement.

To get out of a Y8 bottom set, I would think your son needs to achieve at least a level 4 in German. To get a level 4, he needs to be able to write a text of at least 40 words using the present tense, where he gives and justifies his opinion. To get a level 5, he would need to write a text of at least 60 words which includes the criteria for level 4 AND adds an extra tense, either past or future.

It's a real shame about your son's class - there should be differentiation within a class, the most able in a bottom set should be stretched appropriately! PM me if you want to ask anything else.