Can you explain the logic behind not setting?

[Turquoiseskies]

Ds will start at a large ofsted level 3 school in year 7.

A large bulk of the school will come from areas where expectations are low. These children will come in achieving at a lower level. This may be due to ability or lack of parental expectation amongst other things I guess.
A smaller number come from an area where children are likely to have a higher level when going in. Many children from this area will have been sent to private secondary hence why less of them.
My ds is quiet and conscientious and should be achieving a level 6 by the summer.
I have reservations about the school but we have no option. According to ofsted there is a culture of low level distribution in the classes. I had clung onto the fact that ds would be in the higher sets and that would hopefully mean he avoided much of the disruption.
Anyhow I have heard that there is a move away from setting now and that they will be having mixed groups.
So behaviour aside how on earth can a secondary teacher manage for example a class of 33 where the range of ability is so huge. I can't see that benefiting the able , less able or middle children and I'm
Not sure who benefits. Or are the clever ones meant to help the rest?
I'm worried he will get bored or teased for being clever or fail to make progress etc
Any experiences welcome.

[nooka]

The most disruptive classes I ever experienced was when I went to a public school for sixth form. Some of the boys there were just incredibly arrogant, clearly thought that they were massively superior to the teachers and behaved extremely badly. They were very rude to teachers, blew things up for fun in the labs, threw paper airplanes around in class and just generally pissed about. Got much worse when half of them got EE offers to Oxford too.

[BoffinMum]

Kimmy, it basically says to me lack of resources, Children of all abilities in France speak French (and sometimes a second language) so this is not impossible for any child to do.

The lower attaining group need to have more intensive tuition to get up to a reasonable standard, perhaps a clearer focus on the mechanics of the language so they have a secure grounding, and regular trips to France, etc. Of course that is an ideal and not always easy to do on the average school budget. Interestingly my mother used to have to teach mixed ability French and she had them not only doing that but also got the odd one into Oxbridge to do MFL even though the local area was pretty deprived.

[BoffinMum]

My overarching point, and this applies to the skiing analogy too, is that we are not nearly imaginative enough about how to distribute teaching resources and we often fall into the lazy pattern of setting pupils as a proxy for a kind of pupil typing, as this means teachers don't keel over with the effort of propping up a dysfunctional model.

"We" meaning institutions and Government policy.

[Witchend]

Interestingly when I did some minor research over setting (with secondary school pupils) the lower end were majorly in favour of setting and the top sets fairly indifferent.
The lower sets said they felt much better at the subjects because although they were placed in a lower set, they didn't find they were struggling with something that others were finding ridiculously easy, which made them feel doubly stupid.

[swingofthings]

DD and DS attends such a school, with a mixture of kids coming from very different backgrounds. It doesn't set children in year 7, and only do so for Maths and English in Year 8 (and even then, they have now stopped it, so only set in Year 9). DD is doing her GCSEs at the end of the year, so far as done two sets of mocks and so far, got a majority of A*s and a few As.

Not being in sets properly until year 9 has clearly had no negative effect on her ability. I have to say though that teachers were fantastic and did recognise the more able pupils and did give them extra attention, mainly spending 1/3 of the class lesson with them when they finished the class exercise way ahead of everyone so they had the benefits of both settling basic knowledge and challenging themselves on more advanced learning.