Use of Laptops/Illegible handwriting

[Uninformed]

d/s has been allowed to use a laptop for longer writing tasks in Y10 (State secondary school with a good reputation) as his cursive handwriting is rubbish/illegible and his typing speed is fantastic. So far so good.
At KS3 (taken Summer 2012) He achieved an 8B in Maths,7A in Science (where he was placed 2nd in the year out of 210 pupils) and is in the top group for both subjects going into GCSE. (He prints rather than use cursive writing in these subjects, at least it's readable)

Also, a 7C each for both History and Geography. His English score at KS3 was 7C for reading/comprehension, 6B for writing, 6C for speaking and listening, overall a 6B was awarded.

We have found to our horror that now starting Year 10 he's been placed in an English class with the Special Educational Needs students, pupils who have a SEN assistant with them, many who barely scored a level 4 at KS3 going at a snails pace, kids with genuine learning difficulties. This class will never cover the curriculum in time.

We were never informed that he would be placed in this group, He's quite capable of getting a reasonable GCSE pass at Level C or above in English, he just can't write longer passages legibly. the school is completely mad!

Has anyone ever heard of this being done before? Do other schools do this?

We're having an angst ridden weekend before trying to tackle the Head of English on Monday.

Well, ds came home today saying he's been moved up in English. (Dropped from set 1 to 3 and now in 2). Ironically he was happy to stay in the lower English set - his problem was with the concurrent lower humanities sets which haven't been changed . It all seems too complicated to explain again in ansaphone messages to his Head of year, so we'll leave things as they are because ds is happy with the friends in this class.

But he did say it gave him a massive kick up the bum and he's going to put much more effort into English now. except catching up with the book the new set is reading

Just to say I haven't abandoned this thread, we're going to see the Headteacher & Head of English on Friday. I will tell all when I know.

Sorry to have taken so long getting back, frankly I'm in shock! It appears unbeknown to us, that D/S is in a mixed ability class. Apparently they have 2 "fast track" classes (about 56 pupils in all) and the rest of the 210 year group are "mixed ability". It took about 45 mins to extract this information out of them.

The schools literature says, for years 7,8 & 9 (for English,Maths & Science) "Pupils are taught in sets based on their ability" Then for Year 10 going into the GCSE's "The teaching groups are decided according to ability. Groups are carefully chosen to ensure that pupils are able to work happily.."

Whenever we asked which English class d/s was placed in, we've been consistently told over the years that he is in the second group. We, nor any of the other parents I've spoken to, knew that the second group is about 150 kids, the rest of the year group!

This is deliberately misleading. I've spoken to a lot of the other parents and they believed that the classes were ability classes in English! They also had no idea!

But, weirdly enough, the statement above was true for Maths throughout the years, they were ability classes throughout. So why use the same statement for both subjects if it wasn't an attempt to mislead?

I wonder if it's not just the parents they're trying to hoodwink. It's all semantics isn't it? Do OFSTED believe that their English classes are all arranged according to ability in the same way that the Maths classes are?

I actually don't agree with mixed ability groups, they're just trying to level all the pupils in the class to a level C, whereas some of the more able pupils could have achieved a level B if only they had been stretched.