Does your Primary school have maths sets?

[RandomlyChosenName]

My child’s school used to set for maths but it has now stopped doing this. They might still set in year 6, but I’m not sure.

As a consequence, my daughter who is good at maths is being taught with the rest of her class and is bored and not progressing as the work is too easy, even with “extra depth” element.

I wondered if anyone knew why the school might have changed their approach and stopped setting, if it was common to have mixed ability maths through primary and, most importantly, how they can help my child so she’s not being held back by this?

What year is your DD in? How good is she at maths – was the previous top group challenging enough for her?

It can be difficult for teachers who are not maths specialists to keep up with the most talented kids. You’ll find plenty of stories on the gifted and talented board about this. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s ability tables/sets or whole class teaching – it’s still a challenge to cater for true outliers every lesson.

Has your DD asked the teacher for more challenging work? Does she always complete the work quickly and accurately and ask for more? Can she set herself some great extension work to ‘show off’ to the teacher? How responsive is the teacher to this sort of input?

Have you had a meeting with the teacher about this?

Lots of schools are doing away with ability tables successfully. I don’t think challenging this change of policy is your answer, but your DD does need to be given appropriate work, so I’d speak to the teacher to ask what steps they are putting in place to ensure this happens.

Yes they do, but even the top set is not hard enough for my ds since he started school.

If your dd is not challenged by extra depth element either, then you should really need to speak to your school/teacher, how they can stretch her according to her ability.

I think it depend on school, and individual teacher how they accommodate outliers. I have given up on school. Some teacher do try, but still, they may not be skilled enough to stretch children out of their league. I resorted in giving my ds an access to maths at home. There are so many options these days.

My ds is doing ks3/4 maths at home, while he is doing age related maths at school. He says he gets bored sometimes, but also comes up with quite impressive way/ideas to extend his knowledge doing very easy work.

My DC have now left primary, but they didn't have sets. The primary maths curriculum has age level expectations, so your daughter (and the whole class) should still be taught all of these for her year group.

Mixed ability teaching is generally preferred at primary level, I thought?

It does however, sound like your school's "extra depth" is not sufficiently challenging for your DD - this is something you definitely should raise with the school. If she was previously being challenged, then the school still has those materials available to challenge her!

Sorry I wasn’t very clear- my older child was in maths sets from year 3. It’s a big primary, 3 forms, so they mixed up the forms and put them into 3 ability sets for maths from year 3. A teacher then taught each set according to the ability of that set.

My younger child is in juniors now, but they have stopped setting them so they are just in their forms for maths now, but sit on ability tables. As I understand it, the teacher stands at the front and teaches the the whole class a concept (ie subtracting 4 digit numbers) and then each table does work on the concept according to their ability on that table.

My daughter is on the top ability table, not necessarily the best on the table, but understands how to do the things the teacher teaches them immediately and is ready to move on to the next concept, but the whole class seems to have to progress at the same speed thanks to the lack of setting.

I wondered if mixed ability classes was the norm at Primary school and what the idea behind it is. Why has my school changed? We seem to have gone from teach to the average ability of the top/ middle/ bottom third of pupils to teach to the average ability of all the pupils which seems to be a disadvantage to everyone bar the average.

I will obviously speak to the teacher to see what they can do to stretch my child.

One of the main elements of Singapore maths (the latest way of teaching maths) is mixed ability grouping. Google it for an explanation of the theory behind it and how it affects different abilities.

Thanks, I’ll have a look

They used to stream in my ds's school too. But stopped it since new NC.
new NC is about mastering and mastering at greater depth, and new sats is different, everyone takes same test, not like in the past, that there was level 6 for able children. At least that's how I understood.
How they stretch the able seems to depend on each school, some says they can't teach beyond year group curriculum(which is not true), some school seems to do better job, reading on the MN.

Yes, it's like Irvine says. Under old curriculum, where you had levels, a school would accelerate a dc to next level when ready. So some year 6s would only have been taught to level 4 level, while some would have taught to level 6. Now all children learn the same concepts, together, at the same speed. Greater depth means that you apply the concept in a way that requires problem solving skills and possibly other skills you have learned previously. It doesn't mean you move onto the next concept ahead of the rest of class. I think that can make math boring for some. There is only limited scope of going into greater depth with things like subtracting 3 digit numbers etc.

Randomly,

I teach in a school which moved from setting to non-setting.

We had a lot of the fears that you have - that it would restrict the progress of the most able, and therefore we have always worked very hard at providing greater depth / problem solving opportunities for all (we didn't replace sets with ability tables: the resources are available to everyone in the class in any given lesson, and we assess 'on the go' as to which pupils might need some support or some extension in a given session).

Interestingly, so far our data indicates that all children do better under our current arrangements, and our recent results were the best they have ever been, not only for the 'average' but also the most able. It may of course be that we as teachers are very, very focused and concentrated on doing things 'in a new way' and so are teaching 'better', rather than just the removal of sets.

There are lots of resources, both explicitly for 'greater depth' and also for open ended problem solving.

nrich is the best 'all in one place' site for the open ended problem solving examples for addition and subtraction but it does come with the 'be aware' warning that these problems are about the process / the thinking rather than about 'getting the right answer'. The tasks themselves can seem quite 'trivial' (adding / subtracting three consecutive numbers, for example) but they are designed to encourage mathematical thinking outside the 'there is one right answer which gets a tick' paradigm.

The NCETM resources, though limited in number, were an early attempt to illustrate the difference between 'mastering' a concept and showing greater depth, so they can be interesting in giving some background to what might be going on in the classroom: hope these are accessible

Thank you. I will speak to the teacher about more “greater depth” work. I do find new NC quite frustrating though- that children aren’t allowed to progress faster (or slower) than NC dictates.

My yr 4 sons class do it in sets much to his disgust because he's on one of the higher tables and has to do two lots of sums where the others only have to do one.

Yr3 son whole class get taught the same except a handful of kids who are a bit behind the rest of the class.

My ds is using these sites to stretch his maths.

parallel.org.uk/
mathigon.org/
wild.maths.org/
nrich.maths.org/
artofproblemsolving.com/videos
www.geogebra.org/
brilliant.org/
www.youtube.com/channel/UCoxcjq-8xIDTYp3uz647V5A

They still set in my children's school for maths only. But it's a massive 4 form entry. They still differentiate within the sets too as the children have different coloured sheets to work on.