Secondary School that doesn't set: any experience?

[Tomatillo]

I was at an open day for our catchment secondary this week and was surprised to find out that they have just moved to a system where there is no setting at all for any subject in any year. Has anyone had experience of this? Does it work, especially for the brightest?

The teacher who is leading this at the school said that the research showed that only the top 10% benefitted from setting and that removing setting was neutral for the middle band and beneficial for the bottom half. They also talked about the benefits for self-esteem, behaviour and teacher expectations. Assuming this is all correct (I've not yet looked it up in detail) then I can completely see why a comprehensive school (which this is) would want to do this for the benefit of everyone. The difficulty is that we're pretty sure that DD is well within the top 10% for the core academic subjects. Whilst I appreciate that things can change at secondary, her primary have made it very clear that they consider her to be exceptionally able. My own schooling was very heavily set, with sets for almost everything and quite finely graded with 12 levels for maths. This meant that we progressed very fast and I've always thought that helped me go from my very average comp to a 1st at Cambridge. I'm pretty concerned that she'll be disadvantaged if she goes to this school. I asked the teacher about the top students and they essentially said that there were issues for the top group and they appreciated our concerns.

Does anyone have any experience of this? At the moment we are feeling that it would be the wrong decision for her.

Thanks!

Our sets are pretty flexible. I'm currently teaching a y12 who started in set 4 in y7, then in y8 moved up to set 3, then set 2 in y9, and ended up doing her GCSEs in set 1. She's now doing A level. All of those sets were the right place for her at the time, as she needed to address some misconceptions before she could progress. She worked extremely hard, and her parents supported her at home. We have quite a few kids who move up or down through the setting structure throughout the secondary years.

Knowing that any system used can have its failings, and no school has 100% good teachers, it's not surprising, then, that many parents select the system they feel will be more likely to benefit their child at the expense of others than vice versa. By the sound of it, setting works better for the more able, if schools have a tendency to give the better teachers to the more able classes, and mixed anility works better for the middle, but can let down the outliers at either end of the spectrum if not done well.

Thinking about some students who need functional literacy but can't access the GCSE it would be great if they could do classes that were literacy skills rather than 'analyse 19th century texts and write a letter about pollution to your MP'.

This is exactly how it worked in my school. It's also not without problems as you do get low-achieving, poor behavior classes at the remedial end. But everyone had to take 2 history classes which were not set or leveled. So while you might be in a basic English class, other classes were mixed ability and there was less grouping overall than some of the methods described here. Also you don't have all your classes with the same 30 kids, each schedule is individual to the student's choices.

I teach Languages and mixed ability in Year 7 is tricky (esp with 31 in every group) as we have some who have done lots of French in their primary school, some who have done none, and some who have done a different language eg. Spanish.
I'm doing my best to try and differentiate 10 ways every lesson but it's hard work.

I think we all believe in equality of opportunity , but do you honestly believe that everyone, no matter what their genes, their aptitude, their effort - can achieve the same outcome? In every subject?

Not the person you are replying to but yes that's obviously impossible, however, it is possible to have smaller gaps between lower and higher achievers - the gap between lowest and highest is much smaller in Finland, as is the gap between different schools, so it is possible.

user
We still have that low performing poor behaviour tail end now. Only difference is instead of being able to offer them a useful qualification we are pushed into entering them in for an exam that they can't access so they spend 2 years of a gcse course feeling stupid, which doesn't help thr behaviour.

I have taught sort of remedial groups further down school and enjoy teaching them. But by y10 i can't help but feel there needs to be some acceptance thay functional skills may be a better route to literacy for some students.

Natsku Finland is also much more socially homogeneous than the UK. Only about 5% of children live in poverty where the figure is about 30% for the UK. I’m sure that the narrow attainment gap in Finland is linked and we cannot hope to emulate that academic success while our country is so economically divided.

I don't have any data but as a secondary English teacher I can offer my experience. I work in an academy in London. We set by ability across all subjects and get the best results on our borough across all ability levels.
That said, our school is a well known exam factory, where both students and teachers are pushed to the berg limits, sometimes beyond what I think is healthy or sane. Plus all focus is on academic performance so we are very weak in extra curricular, performing arts and sports. (Sorry if this detail seems irrelevant- I am trying to give context of our high performance: it definitely comes at a cost).

I have only taught mixed ability English at KS3 and I found it extremely difficult, and so did the students. I don't feel that any ability level was getting the best out of my lessons. Perhaps if I had been more experienced at that stage (it was early on in my career), and better at differentiation, it would have been more successful. However even now that I am much more experienced, I find the concept of differentiation for wildly varying ability to be something of a myth! I can differentiate well within the context of a reasonably similar ability group (even in top and bottom sets the ability is very varied), but to teach a lesson on, say, Great Expectations, to a room of students in which some only understand 30% of the vocabulary and others have devoured the whole book in their own time, is, for me, impossible to do well. Maybe that is just my personal failing, but I suspect most of my colleagues would be similarly stumped!

I know setting does come with disadvantages, in particular to self esteem. However, in my school at least it certainly cannot be said that teaching in the lower sets is unambitious. We genuinely put our very best and more experienced teachers with the lower achieving students, and we teach them high level skills and concepts. One of the most amazing moments this year was on results day, when several of the students in our lowest ability classes got 6s and one boy even a 7, in English Lit. I am talking to very lowest ability classes here- this boy has significant SN was predicted a 4! (Ok maybe the result was a total fluke, but other children in low sets achieved plenty of 6s too). And at the top end, our cohort for Eng Lit (both year 10 and 11 sat it, so 440 kids), achieved over 30 level 9s and many more 8s.

Anyway, my experience is entirely linked to my own school, but I don't think I would ever want to teach in a school which didn't set.

Apologies if some of this is garbled- have been up all night with sick baby

maisy I know a retired teacher who did exactly that in the 80's. She was an ex university lecturer who turned to secondary teaching. Completely ignored what was then the curriculum, and taught bottom set English what she thought was beneficial for them.

Some turned out to be kids that now would be dx as having Sen, but once engaged went on to a full curriculum, others who would always struggle at least learnt functional skills, rather than remaining disengaged and leaving illiterate.

When things changed and she no longer had that freedom she quit and went back to university. The vast majority went on to meaningful employment/ achieving their goals, and she didn't want to go back to what the school had formerly done, churning out disenfranchised, illiterate drop outs who ended up in the dole queue.

Of course someone like you doesn't get that choice because the DofE know better about what is needed by the kids in front of you.

Returning to the maths, yes some dc will always find it easy, whether in top set of a super selective or mixed. The difference is that with a small range the teacher has more time to at least offer some none curriculum challenge, whereas even the most skilled teacher would struggle to teach completely different topics.

I also completely disagree that it's possible to offer challenge to the most able within the primary curriculum and age expected topics. Typical top 20%, yes of course you can. Top 1/2%, no.

I do agree that challenging the top 1% all the time would be impossible, let alone in a mixed ability primary class. But acknowledging that is far more preferable to a pretence that they can be challenged by differentiating the same topic.

Most able dc can be challenged within it, but not all.

MsAwesomeDragon the Shanghai Maths thing is so interesting. Imagine the results we could also get if we taught a class in the morning, marked their books straight away then hoiked back students who hadn’t got the concept that afternoon for remedial teaching so that everyone started the next day having understood the previous lesson. I asked Charlie Stripp of the NCETM who was talking about implementing mastery whether the government would also be implementing the low contact hours which made it successful and he said no, it would have to be done within the UK system where teachers have 90% contact time instead of 40%. So yeah, the government want the results but aren’t actually prepared to do it properly so we have teachers like can’t grabbing kids at lunchtime when she is unpaid to try to make it work.

I hadn’t heard about parents being expected to act as TAs. Can you imagine that happening here!

I'm sure I've also read/heard that the Shanghai model is flawed because it doesn't include the full social demographic.

I know noble. I was amazed at the difference in working conditions. They have a long "lunch break" where kids are expected to go and get help from their teachers about questions they need help with, or work independently to improve on the subjects they are doing least well in.

I did ask about how the parents as TAs thing works if the parents work or aren't capable of helping their child. Nobody had an answer for me, they didn't seem to understand the concept of a child not having a capable adult prepared to spend all day at school with them. My 2 nephews would be screwed under that system as both their parents work on low incomes and they can't afford to either lose wages by going in to school, or to employ a tutor. Their parents (my sil and her ex) also struggle with academic work, even at a primary level, so they just wouldn't be able to help.

Noble This small gap is also present in schools with high levels of immigrant children though who are obviously not homogeneous with Finns, and there still is poverty but that doesn't impact on education so much because of the way things are done in the schools (free meals for everyone, social workers and psychologists in the schools, early intervention into any issue whether school related or not etc.). Higher levels of economic equality are definitely a factor though, but another one that can be changed like happened here (inequality used to be huge - rich landowners or factory owners and then pisspoor everyone else, almost no middle class at all)

Lurked,

I agree that the top 1% (or the child i knew who accessed A-level Maths before they left Primary, and university level maths by KS3) can't be challenged every day in a primary classroom.

But equally, we have to remember that on average each teacher in primary will only have a top 1% child every 3 years, so saying that a system should be changed because 1 child every 3 years will need something different isn't proportionate. Equally the provision for a child with acute dyscalculia is of course different - but again, they are rare, and so specific provision is made at the time, rather than changing the overall system for all because someone with dyscalculia can't fit into it.

I would be fine with a setted system where the genuine outliers had something different - remembering that even in a school taking in 240 at y7, there will be either two or 3 pupils in the top 1%, and 2 or 3 in the lowest 1% - but see no reason why the middle of the normal distribution curve should be arbitrarily subdivided into a granular hierarchy of sets. So a single top set, a small SEN group, then lots of parallel middle sets for KS3 after mid Y7, a top set targeting 8s / 9s in Higher tier, a set of parallel sets targeting 5-8s in Higher, a set of parallel sets targeting 2/3-5 in Foundation, then an SEN set in KS4.

For one thing, ability across all aspects of Maths is often variable. One of the most able primary mathematicians I have ever taught in terms of number would have been a natural member of the lowest set for aspects of maths that involved visualising or manipulating shape.

High workload of teachers in the UK is abhorrent, how can teachers be expected to help children outside of class time when they have so much class time? They only have about 20-25 hours a week contact time here, the rest of the time is needed for everything else teachers have to do.

I think the top 1 or 2% would be better served within the special education system - it doesn't and shouldn't have to be just for those who are on the lower end but also on the very extreme top end, so they could get pulled out for small group/individual teaching to challenge them more in areas where they excel far above the normal high achievers.

One of the most able primary mathematicians I have ever taught in terms of number would have been a natural member of the lowest set for aspects of maths that involved visualising or manipulating shape.

You just literally described my DS there! Maths is a subject that still needs very special differentiation.

His CATS scores : 130 in the number bit ; 85 in the space and shape bit. I don't think any maths teacher ever catered to his particular need. he wallowed in a set 2 unnoticed and unsupported. Setting does not solve all issues and I think there is a complacency surrounding that , as if all children in a set are identikit drones with exactly the same needs , skills, abilities.

I think the example given above of a child getting a 7 from a bottom set is interesting : it's almost as if you are saying it is because he was in the bottom set maybe, actually, that had more to do with attitude to learning, increasing maturity of the child, great teaching, small class sizes... or maybe it was because the class, in effect , was a very small mixed ability group and the skilled teacher differentiated for his needs!

set of parallel sets targeting 5-8s in Higher, a set of parallel sets targeting 2/3-5 in Foundation

Nope nope nope. The needs of those different groups of students at the end of those ranges are just not going to be well catered for within the same group. Like I said earlier, we do not teach all the higher topics to everyone sitting higher and we do not teach all the foundation topics to everyone sitting foundation.

don't think any maths teacher ever catered to his particular need

Tbf they'd probably never come across anyone like him before! The state school system is not set up to deal with rarities, including the kid who did GCSE in primary school. We'll do our best, of course.

My kids are at a GS and kids doing GCSE maths at primary is not that unusual.There are at least a couple in each year group of around 100 students who have done higher maths GCSE before they arrive.

It's such a shame that this happens (GCSE in primary) when all the advice is not to.

Well, to be frank, noble, the fact is, they did. I flagged it up many, many times and the lack of interest, or even care, was astonishing.

I taught a boy with a very similar profile. It's not all that unusual. DS2 is not as extreme, but similar. Why do schools bother doing CATs if they aren't going to act upon the results??

My school doesn't do CATs anymore. Cost cutting, and you're right, we don't use them for anything.

Bloody well should,

DS's school does them in the sixth form. God knows why. To have yet another system to work out ridiculous target grades which cannot possibly reflect his skewed data.