Any teachers here? Do mixed ability classes work?

[SpoonsAndForks]

I need to hurry up and decide whether my DS takes up his state school place for September or stays on at his private school.

His state school has mixed ability classes for all subjects apart from maths and English.

I'd like to know (especially from teachers) how this works with 32 children of very different ability. Is it really possible to differentiate and offer the right amount of challenge for each child?

How does it work in language classes where some children have already had 2 years lessons on the language and others are beginners?

Do the more academic kids suffer and end up not reaching their full potential or can they still fly academically?

I'm a teacher btw and conducted my research rather than just read around the topic.

Science can wait until year 9 type age.

What do you base this on? Why is it different than maths and English?

It depends on how big the mix is in my opinion.

I tend to find parents of more able children (especially those who think their children are brightsr than they are) seem to love setting. The problem is everyone wants to be in set 1 even though the target grades are the same as set 2 because some are fixated with the number on their timetable in an unhealthy way. Equally, you spend half your year dealing with demands to move up. Nobody seems to realise that for someone to move up, someone else has to move down (and then you get the whining because someone has moved down). People who like setting tend to like it because they think their child will be on the right side of things. Nobody seems to favour setting when their hard-working lower ability child risks being in a class full of badly behaved and disruptive students who are in there due to behaviour.

In terms of mixed, if you've got a broadly middle to able cohort then a mix of, say, grade 6-9 students is a nice mixed class to have. Even with 1 or 2 lower-mid ability students on 4s mixed worked well.

What I don't think works is having a fully mixed class of grade 2-9.

Every school I have worked in that is in 'mixed' ability classes tends to have a higher than average intake & then is careful where it puts its outliers at both ends (e.g. don't put the brightest 2 children in the year in a mixed class with the 4 children who are on literacy catch up) because a massive spread gets more and more difficult as the curriculum gets more challenging.

As a parent of 2 academic strugglers, I find my DDs have got on better in setted classes than in mixed ability. Their confidence improved by not having the clever kids calling out answers before they had read the problems (maths), and by feeling they could contribute their own ideas (English, Humanities). Smaller class sizes in lower sets also helps.

That said, one of the best performing schools locally apparently has mixed ability for everything bar maths.

So it depends on the quality of teaching in that school and classroom.

Of course no school can ever guarantee that it will only ever have excellent, experienced teachers (especially in the current climate and with the cuts), so presumably that would indicate that schools should all use setting then?

I think it depends. Having worked with low ability they were very keen on setting as (in their words) they didn't feel stupid when other people were whizzing through the work and they were struggling.

At my dc's school they set for Maths in year 7, Languages half way through year 7 (because they do 2 languages for the top set) and in year 8 do a basic setting (1 top, 2 small bottom and rest mixed) for English, and in year 9 they set for Science, in 2 groups-triple science and double science. The top will all do triple, the bottom do double, but in the middle they can choose/discuss which is more suitable for them, so they can end up in the top end sets of the double science or the bottom end of the triple.

I think the learning languages for 2 years at primary doesn't really make any difference. My dc do not have an aptitude for languages and did a different language at primary to the one they do at secondary (don't ask!!) but have ended up in the top group.

MarchingFrogs you asked about whether I talked about this at an open event - wish I had!

I (very stupidly) just assumed that all secondary schools had sets for most subjects, then found out very recently from another parent that this school doesn't. So have no opportunity to ask the teachers. I did email the school and had some generic reassurance back, but sadly no chance to ask the individual teachers themselves. In the school's email they confirmed that they only set for maths and english and no other subjects, right the way up through the school.

My son came home from transition day saying he thought the lessons were going to be too easy for him. He's done two years at private prep of French and Spanish. His prep school was like secondary with different teachers for each subject all streamed.

Also thank you so much to everyone who's posted so far, it's very interesting to hear about the different research you've done and experiences you've had.

My son came home from transition day saying he thought the lessons were going to be too easy for him.
The point of induction day is to get y6s familiar with the school and meet other students, get used to a bigger environment.

To come away from a couple of short sesisons deciding lessons at the school will be too easy raises questions of arrogance in my opinion.

Of course no school can ever guarantee that it will only ever have excellent, experienced teachers (especially in the current climate and with the cuts), so presumably that would indicate that schools should all use setting then?
That doesn't work as a proposal either.
You need people with excellent subject knowledge to stretch more able students, but then you also need strong teachers in lower sets.
Some schools put weaker teachers in lower sets and that becomes crowd control.
If you put your stronger teachers in lower sets to close the gap then someone will complain that the teacher of top set isn't stretching their DC.

Then add in that typically GCSE and A level get priority staffing so in many schools KS3 gets shifted around the KS4/5 timetable and suddenly staffing classes becomes more tricky.

If you've got a department like mine where everyone is strong then you can start allocating classes to people's strengths (eg. Bill is fab at middle KS3, Lorna is goot with the students who need extra support, Dan had a top last year so he can have set 3 this year, we're mixed for these years so look at the class lists and try to match staff to the mix of students). Departments like ours are a minority because even good schools have trouble recruiting consistently strong teachers at the moment.

Have you looked at the Progress8 and Attainment8 values for the high achievers (on the Dept of Education website). This will tell you whether the high achieving kids make good progress compared with similar at other schools.

Note that on the taster days the last thing they would have wanted would be to do anything 'hard'.

Teachers at Open evening would not express reservations about mixed ability teaching because it’s a sales pitch.

Mixed ability works I the teacher is good, the planning is good and the teacher is ‘on it’ that day. In fact if you have all those things combined, it’s like a beautiful alchemy.
You can’t guarantee the above though and often time is wasted dealing with behaviour, children sitting waiting because they’ve finished, children struggling a copying the work of the person next to them, lack of challenge and so on.

DC's school is mixed ability all the way through except for maths. Our experience is positive - as long as you have a good teacher. With a weaker teacher, it's not worked so well (although equally both DC had a weak teacher for maths this year - so the one subject that is setted - and both have made very poor progress with her).

The point of confirmation for me was comparing the results of a local secondary school that has a similar profile of intake to DC's school but sets in everything from Y7 - the results were virtually identical.

I wouldn't worry too much about taster day sessions being too easy - for obvious reasons teachers are not going to plan anything too difficult for a taster day

I love my mixed ability options classes and hate my setted core subject teaching. Behaviour is better in the mixed ability groups and the ethos is more positive. Nearly all my year 10s are on track to meet or eceed targets. OK, it's nice when one gets a top set , but it's an annual bitch fest and bun fight to get that! Ime when classes are mixed ability the person putting the groups together looks beyond data and does a more careful, considered job to create groups.

My preferred choice in English (which has no tiers of entry) would be top sets and the rest mixed. The bottom sets have become a toxic ghetto and ano go zone for female students. Bollocks is it helpful to those students.

Maths may well be a different ball game.

btw my mixed ability groups are genuinely mixed : grades 2 - 9, all doing well. I do after school enrichment for the grade 9 and 8s who want to come.

As I mentioned on your previous thread, our local school sets only for maths. They get excellent results, but also have been cheating massively on controlled assessments in order to achieve those results. Not knowing which schools have been cheating makes it difficult to compare the effectiveness of schools simply by results.

I feel my DD was seriously let down by the mixed ability system, which was aiming too low for her. This problem was aggravated by a too 'progressive' approach to lessons - too much attempting to "engage' uninterested pupils by playing lots of games, pointless word searches, too much group work where other pupils skived, etc etc - and of course no textbooks (fairly common in state schools). She was bored and uninspired. However, she is primarily interested in humanities subjects. I think her friends who were interested in maths and science were better served - partly because the split between double and triple science meant those classes set themselves, if you see what I mean.

Interestingly - primary here - we moved from setted Maths to non-setted maths and the grades for all, especially the number at greater depth in SATs, absolutely shot up.

Essentially, setting seemed to be limiting the attainment of he 'non top', because the lower sets tended not to be exposed to the 'hard' stuff, and that put a ceiling on what they could achieve.

We do have to work hard with the lowest attainers within the class, but tvbh we have all been really surpried by how dramatically successful it has been at raising attainment. The very highest attainers have remained very high achieving, but of course 120 at Y6 SATs, or level 6 in old money, isn't a good measure of 'very high Maths ability', so we may still be - and may always have been - putting a ceiling on the attainment of the extraordinarily able, simply due to the limitations of the primary curriculum and testing.

Local very successful comp starts with sets only in Maths, increases to sets in most subjects by Y9, then goes back to mi8xed ability for all except the very small number of core subjects (Maths, English, sviemnce) once GCSEs are chosen for Y10. Having mixed ability groups who have all CHOSEN e.g. French or History or Product Design seems to work very weoll indeed, so i wonder whether the setting is as much about behaviour / motivation as it is about ability in those core subjects with a single level of entry (ie not Foundation / Higher like Maths)

Don’t go confusing correlation with causation, cant

I find behaviour to be massively better in mixed groups. Hugely so. Teach to the top and support those who need it works well.

I’ve taught both setted and mixed ability groups in different subjects in Y10and 11, sometimes with the same students, for example student A in top set Maths and mixed ability ICT, student B in set 3 Maths and same group as student A for ICT.
Classes were planned and managed differently, students mostly met targets - in ICT more exceeded targets, but that was down to keeping on top of coursework and demanding high standards of work from all.

As a teacher, I will tell you that mixed ability benefits the students overall and, because it tends to benefit the students who are already disadvantaged by lower ability and - linked to that - social disadvantage, it is the moral thing to do.

As a parent, I would tell you to avoid it if your DC is above average ability.

Noble - I agree, as there are lots of other factors in play (having to re-write all plans for mixed ability groupings, and sharing these across whole year groups will also have had an effect, for example) but it was NOT what we were expecting (or rather, we were expecting a MUCH smaller positive effect).

Tracking and graphing marks for each individual student across the school before and after setting was really interesting, though: clear 'separate peaks' (ie 'most people in each set got around this mark') for each set before, a real mix and a much more even overall picture afterwards, .

Genuine question - in which subjects are sets NECESSARY for high ability students Pengggwyn?

Maths I can see the argument at secondary. Which other subjects? History? DT? Art? Languages?

cantkeepawayforever

They're not 'necessary' for any subject. Teaching to mixed ability is perfectly possible, just less efficient for the HA.