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?

SpoonsAndForks
It will depend on the schools. We have many parents tell us they are glad their child goes to our school because we offer a lot in line with local independents, but are a free state comprehensive. I'll be honest, I wouldn't pay fees if I could send my child to our school.

We can't offer the same social selection, but we do aim to support all children (including those at both ends of thr range) to achieve their potential. For some of our SEND students that means access to a vocational course with some life skills training at the end of y11, for our brightest then that is Oxford or Cambridge and other well respected courses.

We also teach in a mix of sets, mixed and loosely banded groups.

cant I do certainly do but unfortunately the local comp IS such a school according to friends who have dcs there, some of the children themselves and a teacher friend who works there. A teacher from the comp who has a remit of encouraging more able pupils even told us we should try for Grammar.
Direct quote from one of DD’s friends “ I don’t want to be one of the bright kids anymore I want to be one of the cool kids so I’m not going to work as hard”
So while I agree some state Comps can and do encourage the most able the one available to us doesn’t.

But it sounds like you are in a grammar school area... not really a comp then?

Just about to post what Piggy did - the other school is suyrely a secondary modern, since you talk of your child attending a grammar?

It was your automatic conflation of mixed ability / non grammar with 'not cool to be clever' that i objected to. Yes, there may be some schools - comprehensive, secondary modern, grammar, private - where it is not cool to be seen to work hard, to try, to strive to be the best. However the lazy 'it has mixed ability classes so it won't be cool to be clever there' stereotype is mildly irritating to those of us who know it's not the case everywhere...

No, the Grammar is in the next town over and few children here take the 11plus.
As I said very clearly I was talking about a specific school, which was the only non selective State option available to us

Well, you seem not to take our word for it that many of us have experiences of schools where students strive to achieve. In fact, that seems commonplace these days. Almost to the extreme.

And I do feel the need to point out that if you have mixed ability you have clever children in every class. Fancy that!

In fact, ime, which is extensive , the not cool to work hard thing is not really about ability and I have only ever experienced negativity towards hard work in rigidly setted by ability situations.

I have a grammar school in my town (my older son is there) - does that mean the other schools are secondary moderns and not comprehensives? What is the difference?

Does it make any difference to my concerns about whether my younger son will do ok in the mixed ability classes?

He just got under 0.25 off the passmark for the grammar school, though I feel he could have passed if he'd put in more effort into the practice papers / preparation.

The issue really really isn't the make up of the classes : it is the school's culture, ethos, structures for support , behaviour and pastoral care , craeers advice and aspiration. Noe of these is linked to how they run the curriculum.

But , yes, if you have grammars it does rather suggets the other school's intake will be skewed.

Sppons,

It is difficult, because the actual intake of a secondary modern vs a comprehensive can be quite similar, or even reversed from what is 'expected', especially if the secondary modern is in an affluent leafy area, with only a few children going to grammar and the comprehensive is in an area which is poorer socio-economically and where educational aspiration in the community is low.

The easiest way to think about this is to think of 'academic ability' amongst the population of a specific age having a 'bell curve' normal distribution. Some of these bell curves will be skewed to the higher or to the lower end due to socio-economic factors.

In a true comprehensive area, the range of abilities of the intake will approximate pretty closely to this bell curve. Some children, predominantly at the lowest end, will attend Special Schools. Some affluent children, often skewed slightly to the upper end, will attend private schools. However, the children within the school will be of a full range of abilities.

In a grammar area, the populations of the grammar schools and the 'other' school [never now named 'X secondary modern school', because of the negative connotations, but in practice that is what they are] will differ markedly from the bell curve. In the 'other' school, removing those who pass the 11+ will produce a sharp drop in the numbers of higher ability children vs the bell curve. As the 11+ is notoriously imperfect at measuring actual ability, there will be a 'tail' of children towards the upper levels of ability, but there will be fewer than there are in the general population in that geographical area. Equally in the grammar school, the 'peak' of the distribution - ie the ability with the largest number of children - will occur at a higher ability than in the general population (how high depends on its selectivity - from top 25% in Kent to 2% or less in superselective areas). there will be a 'tail' of children with lower abilities, but it will fall off much more rapidly than in the general population.

A school in the same town as a grammar cannot, by definition, be comprehesive BUT it does depend hugely on how selective the grammar school is and the proportion of pupils who go there. m,any posters on previous threads have compared e.g. Cheltenham - 1 very highly selective grammar, several near-comprehensives - with Gloucester - 4 grammars, 1 faith school, a number of very obvious secondary moderns.

SpoonsAndForks, could I please make a plea on behalf of the child at the top of the waiting list for your State option (there probably is one?), thaif you are going to give that place up, you let your LEA know very much sooner rather than later? Please don't be the parent who makes their decision known by virtue of their child just not arriving on the first day, by which time the child who gets that place will already have had their allocated school's new uniform bought, some of it now not returnable etc.

Of course, if you are going to drop the indie place, there may also be a 'hopeful' waiting there, as well...

MarchingFrogs yes I really do need to hurry up, that is very much on my mind.

My DH does not support the idea of going private so I suspect we will be keeping the state place anyway. But I want to make sure I am ok with that decision before committing to it.

There won't be anyone waiting for the private school place - we've been offered this scholarship at the last minute and I know us taking it up will mean extra revenue for them, rather than them turning someone else away.

cantkeepawayforever - thank you for that explanation that is very useful, and also very depressing. I'm never sure of the difference between selective and super selective but I'm in a town with one boys grammar and one girls grammar and I know the boys grammar has an enormous catchment area (that goes beyond our town into other towns).

What may be instructive is looking at the 'prior attainment' percentages for each school.

You start from here

Enter your postcode or location (because you will want to compare your grammar and your non-grammar)

Open the school you are interested in.

On the front page, scroll down to 'Results by Pupil Characteristics' and click on 'Prior attainment'.

This will give you, for 2016-2017 Y11, the number of pupils with low, medium and high prior attainment. Typically, for the grammar, it won't add up to the total number of pupils in the year, because it omits pupils who were at private schools for primary, but it will give you an indication.

Using Gloucester as an example, one of its grammars has 3 middle prior attainers and 100 high prior attainers (and 21 who were at private schools).

One of the 'other' schools has 19 low, 50 middle, 42 high

'High' is Level 5 in old SATs grades, so not outstandingly high, Middle is 4s, Low is

Interestingly, grammar does not always mean 'better progress by high attainers'. Another of the Gloucester grammars has only 0.11 Progress8 for high attainers, lower than the figure for good comprehensives in the same county.

Thanks cantkeepawayforever - there are 26 low, 116 middle and 121 high which I assume is quite good?

I did have another thread where someone kindly showed me this too and I told them the progress 8 score and a couple of people said it was good. I just feel so clueless in the face of these numbers though... I never quite understand what they're actually telling me (in real terms if you see what I mean). Progress 8 score and confidence interval is 0.54 (0.32 to 0.76) but does go down when split for boys to 0.42 (0.22 to 0.62) - it's 0.89 (0.67 to 1.1) for girls which makes me think it's harder for boys to do well at this school than girls.

The other thing you have to take into consideration in your position is the availability of subjects at GCSE. Round here subjects are being cut if not enough numbers for GCSE due to the budget cuts. I know this is happening in at least one of the Grammars too.

For DS (not at Grammar) , this has backfired badly as Computer Science is now not running for GCSE for the first time. Suspect this isn’t an issue at the local Grammar, sadly we didn’t see this coming. German was ditched before he got there which we were prepared to take in the chin but the loss of Computer Science now means that half of the 4 options he would have originally chosen are now not available. But he doesn’t get 4 options any more, it’s 3 now. Reminds me I need to start. Thread and see if there are any Computer Science teachers who might be able to help us a bit as we want to see if it might be possible for DS to domwith DH’s help and a bit of support from the school.

That is indeed good Progress8 for a 'non grammar' in a town with grammars. How does the Progress8 for previous high attainers look?

If you want 'what it means in reality', at a very handwaving approximation (because the government have fiddled with it so one grade doesn't = 1 point), it means that in every subject, children at this school get half a GCSE grade higher than they would at a school with the 'average' Progress8. Obviously, you can't GET half a grade, but if someone in the average school with particular SATS levels at the end of KS2 was going to get 77777777, then someone at this school with the same starting point would, on average, get 77778888.

Does that help at all? It will depend a bit on the mix of subjects, as Post says.

Thanks cantkeep that's very helpful.

That was the progress 8 score for high attainers (sorry, should have specified), so for high attainers it's 0.54 (0.32 to 0.76) but for the whole school overall the progress 8 score is 0.64 (no numbers given in brackets).

Any idea what the numbers in brackets mean?

the numbers in brackets are confidence intervals. It indicates how certain you can be that the figures are 'valid', and what range they are definitely in.

So, say, if you had 2 pupils only in particular group, 1 with Progress8 of 1, and 1 with 0. The Progress8 for this subgroup might be 0.5 (0-1) [it's more complicated than that, but it illustrates the principle]. So if a school has a Progress8 of 0.5 (-0.2 - 1.01) then you can't have all that much confidence in the 0.5 - the progress 8 is very likely to lie in the range -0.2 to 1.01, but not that likely to be 0.5 exactly. On the other hand, a school where the Progress8 is 0.5 (0.4-0.6) shows that the Progress8 is really quite likely to be around 0.5, because the statistically likely range is only between 0.4 and 0.6.

So in the case of the school you are looking at, progress8 for high attainers is very likely to lie between 0.32 ( pretty good) to 0.76 (very good) - I'd be OK with that, especially for a non-grammar in the presence of a grammar.

I've just looked up the score for the sixth form - it goes down to 0.06 which seems odd considering the score for secondary is only just below the score for our local grammar.

No, Hopping.

In my experience, the top set kids seem to think that they are God's gift to Earth just because they have a "1" on their timetable.

This attitude will not serve them well in the real world where everyone is on a level playing field and top marks in a Geography test will not automatically entitle them to their first choice career.

How many move between schools for 6th form? Quite normal, IME, for there to be quite a lot of movement at that stage, so the students at the end of Year 13 may not be the same ones as finished Year 11.

Interesting chat with my spiky-profile DS who is currently waiting for his GCSE results.
He is extremely good at maths, top set for nearly everything else, except art, PE and DT where he'd be bottom set, if there had been one.
He said at Primary school, there was always a top table, so even though it was mixed ability, he was barely aware of the differentiated work being done on the other tables. He knew it existed, but it had nothing to do with his experience and so it barely registered.
Then the feeder primary class moved to the same secondary school which had mixed ability non-setting in year 7, except for English and Maths. Suddenly, DS became very conscious of how slowly others learned, including children that he'd been at primary school with. He would have finished the work and any extension work and would sit there waiting, with nothing watching the teacher trying to quietly explain the concept being taught to the least able child in the room who had been in DS's primary class but he'd never been aware before of how slowly she learned things because he'd had other things to get on with.
After year 7, the school gradually set more and more subjects, and each time, DS's experience improved. However, there were still two issues:-

1. The top set (and maybe the bottom set, too?) has the widest spread of abilities, so DS was still finding the pace too slow in maths where he excels, especially when mastery was introduced as it just meant endlessly demonstrating mastery rather than working to achieve it.
2. Art and DT were not set in KS3 and DS would have been bottom set for those. He would have much preferred art and DT to be set so that maybe the projects could have been easier and he wasn't being constantly reminded of how bad at it he is by seeing other people's neat work and then looking down at his wonky, unstable mess.

So, from a boy with a spiky profile who has had direct, personal, recent experience as a recipient of all the things discussed on this thread, the answer is MA at primary and set for everything at secondary.

mmzz the problem with teaching in any set up, is that it's only as good as the teaching. the issues you describe could have been resolved by the teachers being more aware of the children in their class.

My DS is also "spiky" - he is strong at maths/science and more "average" at English/humanities. Mixed ability suits him in English/humanities because whilst working at his level he feels he has the possibility of still getting a good grade rather than being pigeonholed at lower average set level. he's also very good at some aspects of English/humanities and really poor at others. A child like this will always be in the wrong set in a system that sets!

interestingly in maths(the only subject where his school sets) where he is currently working at a Level 8 and predicted to get 8/9 at GCSE he is actually in Set 3 - and this is not a high achieving school, he is working beyond the level of everyone else in that set. School have worked out that he goes to pieces if put in a high set due as he can't cope with the pressure and it's much better to have him a lower set with a more nurturing teacher (who's assured me that Set 3 will still be taught Level 9 material so this won't hold him back).

... I guess the point of my argument is that I think quality of teaching has more impact than the make up of classes.

yes, agreed, but what makes a good teacher? Something else in this thread that caught my eye was the conflation of deep subject knowledge with good teacher.

Slower learners need someone with amazing amounts of patience and the ability to explain things multiple ways, perhaps multiple times. Also a very high degree of empathy.
Disruptive children (and anyone who shares a classroom with a disruptive child) need teachers who have a strong personality and can hopefully inspire them to want to behave and listen.
Those predicted 7/8/9 just need someone who can teach the concepts and give feedback on the work.
Included in the level 8/9s are the one or two who need a teacher with really strong subject knowledge and a passion for teaching who can and wants to help them develop their gift / talent.
That's not always the same teacher, but they are all good as long as they are doing what they are good at.