All education should be streamed

[ladykale]

If training young footballers seriously, we would never suggest that they continue to play past primary school age with players of all abilities. It OBVIOUSLY would mean that either worse players would not get to play competitively and best players would not be stretched.

Why don't we take a similar approach to education?? One of my issues with the U.K. education system is it rarely holds children back even one year despite them not passing basic requirements for a year and it is not commonplace to move children ahead one year.

I think there should be the ability to hold children back for max 1 year and move kids forward by max 1 year so that classes are more indicative of ability, and streaming of abilities across all subjects year to year (to allow movement between years).

Everything feels like it is amount the lowest common denominator (particularly in state schools!) which holds back brighter children imo.

This would be much better than having a separate grammar system which separates kids out so young and does not allow for late bloomers

Whats wrong with a yr6 kid who cant read? A good school will support them, that is better than holding them back

Holding kids back a year will have a similar impact I think to the old 11+, and as noted, children vary in their ability by subject.

I don't agree with the football analogy, as the real divide seems to be much later in many cases.

Do you think it doesnt matter then that this would have an affect on those higher ability children? If you get cancer wouldn't you want a doctor that has been intellectually stretched since a child and performs to the highest ability they can? If you were falsely accused of a crime wouldn't you want a lawyer to represent you who has been supported to perform to the best of their ability? What about scientists researching cures for diseases? People inventing things that make a huge difference to humanity?

Personally I think it's very short-sighted to be happy to stunt the intellectual progress of higher achieving children because they have better "life chances".

Most schools do setting.
Even in Infants (although the children may not be aware). A typical class will have some children on the blue table for maths but the green table for English.
That's setting.
In secondary it's pretty standard isn't it?

As someone who was very good at most subjects and very bad at maths I would have loved to have been set appropriately at my awful school, rather than bored rigid (and therefore disruptive) in most lessons while the weaker ones struggled and then struggling in the hard ones.

So I'm with you OP, but it's not a fashionable pov and you'll get nowhere arguing it on here

Universities only count GCSEs sat in the same year so doing a GCSE early has gone out of favour.

This isn't true. A large number of universities understand perfectly well that DCs have no control over whatever (barmy) system a school chooses to adopt and therefore do not penalise them for it.

DD2's school used to do wholly split GCSEs so Y10: maths, triple science, IT, PE (or other option). Y11: English x 2, MFL, humanity, further maths, statistics (or other options). None of the universities she applied to for a STEM undergraduate course had an issue.

All her friends were obviously in the same boat and went variously to Bath, Leicester, LSE, Reading, Cardiff, Bristol, Durham and Edinburgh.

Schools do set. HTH

My dd was good at maths but appalling at English (dyslexia) so got a*aab at a level because no one gave up on her

I think most schools set. My youngest dd who is at the local comp got set for Maths from the second term of y7 and for literacy. Then in Y8, effectively the top third of the year gets set for languages by taking a second language. And then I think they start setting for science in y9 with the top set being the only ones that can do triple science. Eldest goes to a grammar school where they've obviously been streamed since the start so there they only set for Maths in y9 and nothing else.
We have another local school that doesn't set and seems quite chaotic from a behavioural perspective.

Things have may changed, but I don't remember anyone in my school days absolutely failing maths but coming out with A and As in English and History...*

Funnily enough, this was DH. Got top grades in GCSE English, A level English, has 2 English degrees, career as a writer. Failed GCSE General Science 😂

I do totally take the general point you are making however. It's unusual. And to coin a phrase data is not the plural of anecdote.

Every piece of research I've read on streaming indicates it does more harm than good.

It’s perfectly possible to be in one set for a subject and a different one for another. It’s also perfectly possible to move up and down sets.

Repeating a year or advancing a year would be difficult to organise I think. You could end up with three year group ages in one class and very different levels of maturity.

You get Y6s who can barely read as a lot of teachers have no understanding of dyslexia and parents are constantly told "oh they will catch up" over and over again. Or you get an amazing teacher one year who puts adjustments in place and the next year with a new teacher they don't bother with the adjustments and your kid slides back from where they were.

Setting will make no difference at all to dyslexic children if adjustments, more training for teachers and a true understanding of what dyslexia is and how it presents challenges with the way children learn with it.

My child can not understand phonics, you could hold her back 5 years and she still wouldn't get phonics and how they are taught now. Once we realised this we taught her to sight read and she is actually reading full on chapter books. No amount of "sound the word out" worked for her. So we just told her the word and the next time she remembered it. As part of the curriculum and with what you suggest she would be held back and held back as she doesn't get phonics so would never pass the test.

You are very naive with how schools are now.

The vast vast majority of secondary schools set.

Most primary schools will also group by ability within the class and some if the bigger ones will set.

Within any year group the range of abilities will go from 5 years ahead to 5 years behind.

I worked as a teacher in a secondary school, every kid who came up to us in year 7 did tests - cats and verbal reasoning etc. we had reading ages for all of them. The reading ages for all year groups were from 16 to 5. Without exception.

If you take a kid who in year 7 has a reading age of 16 and put them up a year they will still be top set for that year. You'd need to put them up 3 or 4 years to actually match their ability and that has its own problems.

Equally most kids who go up to secondary not being able to read usually have a reason why not. Some are blind or deaf or severely autistic. I used to teach a nurture group of students like that at secondary.

It just isn't appropriate to keep kids like that down at reception level forever. They need to be prepared for life in supported living environments and have specialist teachers who can work to develop the skills they do have.

While there are known ‘health warnings’ for using EEF research without looking at the subtleties, their summary of research on setting / streaming is here

Overall there is 0 impact, though also low confidence in studies available as many are old.

Their research on in-class grouping is here. It shows a small overall positive effect, larger for Maths.

Both summaries caution for unwanted effects on pupils’ confidence and are careful to define ‘attainment’ rather than ‘ability’ groupings. (Using your football analogy, only one child who was in the local football team’s Academy setup at under 9 level with my DS was in their youth or first team at 17/18. Boys grew, changed, hit a plateau and were let go; other boys equally became stronger and more dedicated and were signed.)

I think you also have to consider ‘where to stop’ in terms of repeating years etc. I have taught Year 4s who could pass Y6 SATs with ease (and many good Y6s with common sense could gain a 4 on.a foundation-level Maths GCSE, as even with a really strict definition of ‘what they have covered’, the primary curriculum is sufficient to answer enough of those GCSE papers to get a high 3). Equally I have taught Y5s and Y6s in mainstream primary who will never obtain a pass mark in SATs, however many years they sit in the same classroom repeating the same curriculum.

Tell me you don't know what you're talking about...

Streaming - same group for all subjects.

Setting - attainment grouping by subject.

As an anecdote, in my large primary school, we used to teach Maths in sets. Results increased dramatically - including a more than doubling of the proportion of children achieving greater depth - when we moved to mixed ability teaching and rethought / redesigned our lessons for mixed abilities. The biggest change was in children at the borders between sets - both those who would have been at the bottom of a higher set (‘oh no, it’s too hard, I’m lost’) and those who would have been at the top of each lower set (‘I’m not in top set, I’m bad at Maths. And we go over the basics so I don’t always see the advanced problem solving’) did massively better than before. We worked really hard to maintain the progress if the highest achievers. Mixed ability does need a different type of thinking and approach, in my experience of both.

Exactly. I won't be taking teaching advice about ability setting from someone who doesn't know the difference between setting and streaming. Latest research, I understand, suggests better outcomes on average for mixed ability groupings.

There is logic in setting where different qualifications are the end points - eg foundation vs higher papers / double vs triple science (I am old enough for CSE vs O-level). And definitely an argument for separate grouping for those with high levels of SEN affecting learning (whether that be special school / specialist unit within the school / a set taught by an SEN specialist with a very high level of support). As a general rule? Not so much.

Most schools do set to a certain extent - i.e. for certain subjects. Setting is unnecessary for some subjects, and impractical in subjects where you don't have a big cohort doing the subject. The fact that you don't know the difference between setting and streaming does suggest that you are not knowledgeable in this area. Also, there are significant downsides to holding kids back a year, and many cases where it would do more harm than good.

Setting exists in maths and languages even in the most selective, independent schools. There is huge variation in the top 5% of ability - there are those that are at the 95th percentile and there are those that have just 'hit the ceiling' of tests and are exceptionally talented. Putting children like these in mixed-ability classes serves them very poorly. Maths is one of the few subjects were setting makes a real difference in respect to topics studied and speed of progress.

Also Maths is one if the subjects with different final qualifications- Functional Skills, Foundation and Higher, Additional /Further. My question would be when it is most appropriate to create those sets and how flexible they should be (a diamond model of a small number of highest / lowest and many parallel middle sets is, iirc, the most appropriate option, reflecting as it does the shape of the normal distribution of ability / attainment). Preventing a ‘later developer’ from reaching higher levels ‘because there’s no space in that set’ should be avoided, as should early setting which causes children to early define themselves as ‘no good at Maths’

I am dyslexic with ADHD (not diagnosed until my 20s). It took me until year 8 to truly get maths. But when I did I moved from a B/C student in Year 8 to an A* in Year 9 and I was getting 100%s in my tests. It happened overnight. Had I been streamed I wouldn’t have even be able to sit the maths paper that allowed me to achieve an A (the foundation maths paper at the time topped out at a B).

In English I was excellent but the teachers focussed on the presentation of reading rather than the techniques. So I used to routinely be marked lower than kids who read beautifully (after memorising the book) but actually had a functional reading ability lower than mine. You often see this issue with Indian kids from English speaking schools who come to this country - they should be fluent but aren’t because their whole English language skillset is tailored to what they’re going to be tested on.

So yes, streaming doesn’t really work in identifying the brightest. What it can do is help the brightest kids (who often have SEN too) to be better behaved by ‘stretching them’ (euphamism to keep them focussed / thinking deeply so they can’t cause trouble).

Also selective education works only when kids have parents who are motivated not because the kids are brighter. If it was the latter all grammars would be at the top of the league tables but they’re not. Only the ones that have large Asian and Indian origin populations are.

Is this a real question?!

A Y6 who can't read will benefit from being progressed to your Y7?! No wonder school resources are so stretched if this is the reality in schools

@ladykale a Year 6 who can't read would most likely have a learning disability.
They would (hopefully) get the relevant support in reading at school but why should they be separated from their year group/friends for other subjects like PE, drama or Art etc.
Holding them back in primary would be mean.