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!

justhope rare as that would be I'm not saying that isn't the case at your school. But are you sure it is the highest achievers/genuinely gifted dc?

Ime a lot of the bad feeling about able provision tends to be slightly off track. Eg the new primary curriculum, a lot of people who have dc who aren't finding it easy mistakenly think that it's catering to the most able. When infact it might be catering to top table/ top 10%, but it certainly isn't meeting the needs of the top most. Or the old sats level 6 target groups, again the top set got a lot from it, but it didn't meet the needs of gifted kids.

Or the new 9 grade. In theory it is to cater to the most able. But in reality nobody can force an unwilling school to teach to that level. Nothing that I've heard about the maths leads me to believe it will really challenge the top 1/2%. And what I've heard of the English isn't really going to separate out those with a gift for it from those who are just very good and happen to have excellent memories. Unless you count the chaos of the introduction as a challenge!

So the impression a lot is being done for the most able when really what is on offer serves the general high ability group below them and makes no difference to the very able, except to give people the false impression they are a priority.

Apologies though if in your case they really are prioritising the top few%.

Lurked,

i think it is difficult because of the slipperiness of the term 'gifted' or 'most able'.

The old G+T 'top 10% of any cohort' thing - 3 in every primary class - is clearly bonkers, both because a particular cohort may actually have 0 gifted children, or 5, and because the vast majority of the top 10% actually don't need specifically different provision.

Some authors use a different scale of giftedness - 1 in 100 (a couple per year in all secondaries, 1 per 3 years in a primary) 1 in 1000 (1 or two per school for secondaries, 1 per career for a primary teacher teaching classes of 30), 1 in 10,000 (one per 10 years in many secondaries, most primaries will never see one). That can be more useful, because it helps us to see how 'different' such a level of giftedness is, and whether there is any point in designing any mass education system around their needs.

Very high levels of giftedness are probably best thought of as a 'special educational need' - some superselective grammars serving very wide areas are possibly the closest we get to a 'special school' serving the needs of this group, though their identification procedures at 11+ are woefully imprecise and probably only xcapable of sifting out those 'of 1 in 10 giftedness who perform well on the day' rather than true 1 in 100, or the 1 in 1,000 pupils who might really NEED such an education.

Otherwise, we are down to individual provision. Those who I know who are in those very high levels of giftedness tend to be accelerated - either generally, or in their specific area of giftedness (they can be average, or even below average, in other curriculum areas).

So I think it is reasonable to complain if a school does not provide routinely well for those in the top 10% (1 in 10); reasonable to expect secondaries to make adequate provision (probably informal, rather than through adapting the formal qualification routes) for the 1 in 100 level, but for the 1 in 1000 and above, invidividual, tailored provision for this level of acute special educational need is needed and should not necessarily be expected from mainstream schools.

Glad the school where mine went did sets.

One I worked in only set for maths. The thinking was the bright kids would bring the others up. Also the low ability would get lumbered with the disruptive dc.

What I mean is, for example, I would not expect a mass qualification in Maths like GCSE to be sufficiently finely nuanced to be able to distinguish between someone in the 1st and 3rd centiles of ability.

However, I would ABSOLUTELY expect the school educating those pupils to enter them for the various levels of the Maths Challenge / Olympiad, including the various Maths team events; have regular STEM events / speakers; participate in the Royal Institution Maths Masterclasses and offer both Maths and Further Maths for A-level, as well as actively taking ambitious A-level mathematicians to open days at e.g. Cambridge, Warwick etc.

I do think that one of the weaknesses of setting is that it gives school the impression that, once they have created a top set, they have 'provided for the able'. Given the shape of the normal distribution, that set will in fact have one of the widest spreads of ability, and so provision for the very able WITHIN the top set still has to be different (either in class, or out of class).

cant I do get that, and actual provision is probably a different debate. It's more that a lot of people resent the subject being raised because they mistakenly think all those things on offer to the top 10% are already meeting the needs of the most able. And so many people don't realise that boredom and lack of challenge are a big problem for happiness and long term outcome. It's 'bright kids do well anywhere'.

I don't know where exactly dd falls in and tbh I don't really care. I'm also endlessly grateful that she's always had teachers that think as you do, and just given her stuff to think about most of the time regardless of whether it's on the curriculum or leads to formal quals. She's quite happy to just get on with old exam papers, old ukmt, adored old o'level stuff a while ago etc

Admittedly at dd's school they have more time/funds to find things than I would expect a state school teacher to do, but even then I wouldn't mind if she sat and read fiction over plodding through curriculum at class speed. At my awful school the most fascinating, and also well behaved lessons I ever had were sat reading materials of my choice which rarely had anything to do with the lesson.

I think the problem is that when teachers/schools don't think like that. I've never had any desire for dd to sit an exam early, but if the choice at any point had been plodding through age related curriculum then I no doubt would have. And yet most people would tell you that your dc is lucky to easily understand it. Or that your dc can't possibly be bored because their top set kid wasn't.

I think the issue isn't even a suitable curriculum. What is needed is more understanding that they can both grasp a concept easily, and more often than not build on it to a more complex level without lots of input or challenge. Rather than it being assumed that endless practice and 47 ways of trying to dress up the first basic concept is the only way they can really understand it.

It doesn't help that we all know delusional, competitive parents who think their dc is the second coming and the only one in the classroom. And it really doesn't help that schools such as dd's primary don't get any acknowledgement/ praise for doing their best to meet her needs. She could have been bored and frustrated, completely put off school by 11 by a bad school/ staff, and yet her sats would have been the same because that's all they measure. If anything ofsted frown on what they did for her. Ditto many kids at secondary.

I agree with every word in the last two posts.
Both say it better than I can.
Parents who think they know what it's like to have a gifted child. Tick.
Do problems 47 ways (aka Mastery). Tick.

This has been interesting to read. I'm a maths teacher and nothing has yet convinced me that MA can truly work for maths. One year I taught both top and bottom set year 8. I taught a child who was working at (old) level 1 and could barely manage his 2 times table, along with several who were level 2 or 3. I taught others who were working beyond level 8 and managing 3D trigonometry. At the time mixed ability was being talked about and I just could not work out even one lesson I could teach, that would be around a common theme and would meet all of these students needs. We had some training on differentiation when a member of SLT mentioned the strategy of sticking an A level question on the board and then just seeing how far each student could get with it (she taught geography). The maths department were all just thinking 'but maths is different!' We said that a lot, because it really is. If I stuck an Alevel question on the board, I would be expecting my students to effectively discover some new maths for themselves to solve it- maybe they could derive differential calculus?! The topics are very much separated by difficulty. In a MA class of 30-32 students you'd just have to set them off on different things and hope they could get started before you had time to get round and explain it to them.

Mmzz. Agree with your agreement!

As far as mastery goes, there is research which shows that, for the most able children, more repetition actually means that they learn less...

As far as mastery goes, there is research which shows that, for the most able children, more repetition actually means that they learn less...
Because it leads to boredom, feeling like no amount of trying harder will improve what happens to you next (i.e. more of the same) and therefore there's no point in trying at all. Then disengagement leads to underperformance??

Mastery came in at the same time as the new curriculum. I wondered if it was the result of a trade off between the Department of education and the teaching unions? Give the teachers extra workload by adding more things for the least able to learn, but in return, you don't have to teach the most able at anything like their natural pace any more. Then justify it all with some research that shows that some kids appear to have understood things but when asked to solve a problem using the knowledge, they can't. Then extrapolate that finding to all kids.

Mastery is one of my bug bears. The other is overuse of the phrase "when you've finished your work, walk around the classroom and see if there is anyone you can help". That's fine once in a while but daily throughout KS2 and KS3? It goes hand in hand with the "you haven't understood something until you are able to explain it to someone else". What if you've explained it six times in the last week?

Hah at the teaching unions having any influence over the curriculum.

then why did mastery appear at the same moment as the curriculum changes?
It used to be that schools were offering differentiated work. Now everyone gets the same thing and for those who can do the basic stuff, there is Mastery which is an infinite variety of different ways of doing the same thing.

Because of an obsession with PISA. A few years back everyone was constantly banging on about Finland but they’ve cocked up their curriculum so now it’s all about Shanghai who are top of the leaderboard. The countries at the top do mastery, hence so must we.

Shanghai does Mastery? Wow! They achieve so well, I wouldn't have thought they'd have the time.

There have been lots of study visits to Shanghai to see what they do, then teachers have come back and said ‘they teach the whole class the same thing, then the teacher is free for the rest of the day to mark the classwork, identify students who haven’t got it, pull them back for additional tutoring so that by the start of the next lesson everyone has mastered the previous lesson’ so the result has been ‘the teacher teaches the whole class the same thing’.

To be fair, I don't think any school can provide for the extreme outliers. There's always going to be a few at the very bottom, and possibly only one at the very top - usually a mathematician. There was a boy in ds's year who was the youngest person ever to get A Level Maths. Ds said he was a bit of a one-trick pony - not being mean, just observing that he wasn't particularly great at other subjects so he wasn't an all-round genius.

Similarly there is a multiple Grade 8 musician in dd's music GCSE class. The next best person has Grade 5 in one instrument so nowhere near the prowess of the first pupil.

And MFL - every so often the bilingual half-French pupil crops up (and the teacher quakes wondering if their every mistake is being noted).

I think in these cases, if one otherwise likes the school, it is best to suck it up and further the dc's learning out of school. The time to put your head above the parapet is when it appears that a teacher is clearly only aiming the lessons at the middle... or even lower.

I can see the ladyincement. What i mind is:
the teacher's reluctance to provide any extension work (not just for DS but any at all)
the way that UKMT certificates were dealt with
and, above all else,
the fact that DS very nearly gave up on maths altogether because he just lost hope (I think the extra curricular stuff has stopped this).

Its easy to be an adult and see that school is just a short time in your life and to know that even school gets progressively more interesting, but as someone else said there is no correlation between ability and maturity.

Oh yes, the whole theory of only understanding it if you can explain it. That only works if the other person is on the same wavelength. And it also assumes that young dc have the emotional maturity and language to slow down their natural thought process and break it down into steps someone else can understand.

Oh yes, the whole theory of only understanding it if you can explain it. That only works if the other person is on the same wavelength. And it also assumes that young dc have the emotional maturity and language to slow down their natural thought process and break it down into steps someone else can understand.

And once they've done that, what next? DD1 spent most of y6 explaining maths to her classmates. She is so good at it that they gave her a y3 child to "mentor." But now she's in a selective 2ndry, she's been put in the middle maths group as they never covered all the concepts.

Not fair at all.

Who dreamed up that crap