John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)’s study of setting children according to their learning needs and abilities in maths provides partial answers to two questions, and raises another. As expected, children who began with high scores in maths made more progress when taught in sets and were not given sufficiently challenging work in many mixed ability classes. Equally expected was the anxiety felt by those who struggle with maths, but this happened in both contexts. So the third question is, “Why do these pupils feel anxious, and why has mixed ability not helped them?”
Professor Becky Francis, who is both CEO of the independent (on paper) EEF and Labour’s Curriculum Czar, rightly said that people had “strong feelings” on setting. Before this study began, she described it as “symbolically violent…pernicious…incompatible with social justice… contra-evidential…doxa.” This is still a widely-held view, and champions of mixed ability have been quick to point out that this is one study, in one subject. So, while her call for a more nuanced approach is welcome, there is still much to be investigated, and not only in maths. For example, almost all successful schools set in modern languages – or disapply large numbers of pupils – and the issue has never been investigated at all, as the answer would almost certainly show greater learning gaps than in the maths study.
My experience of setting in school was positive. I am somewhat literally-minded, and could not see why measuring angles with a protractor did not show whether or not they were equal. Put simply, I had not grasped that proof in geometry was not based on measuring, but on logic. Much later, I discovered that Euclid did not have a protractor, and that the only angles he referred to are right angles. So I suffered late nights and migraine, while those who did understand this could do their homework on the bus home. Moved to the second set, I met the late Bill Broderick, who introduced computing, and taught statistics instead of geometry. Migraines ceased, and I passed with a decent grade. I honour his memory. My determination to learn French got me into a top set, which was also the right result.
As a teacher, I found that my pupils were failing in mixed groups in primary schools, and then again in bottom sets in secondary, where they did not get their share of the best teaching. Professor Dylan Wiliam has established that many do not even have a qualified teacher. Worse, they rarely have teaching matched to their learning needs, as the skills needed to teach low-attaining children have been ignored and neglected in teacher training for decades as part of the push for inclusion. One I taught, who had not been assessed as having SEND, but merely put into a bottom set, did not know any multiplication tables at 15. We started with the 2x table and he is now running his own estate agency. This is not an isolated example. I’m currently teaching tables from scratch to two children aged 9 and 12, and a day in an FE college showed that most retaking GCSE did not know any tables at all.
I recently argued that the maths we all need in the real work is based on arithmetic. It grows out of our early experience of counting, and develops, according to Stanislas Dehaene FRS, as a process of continuous adjustment of thinking to accommodate new material. For decades, however, school maths has been based on a spiral curriculum that includes number work, but – unlike Finland, incidentally – does not ensure that it is mastered. This leaves more advanced ideas, which invariably involve an element of number, without foundation. Whether children in this position are taught in sets or mixed groups therefore makes no great difference to their progress. The EEF’s study, based on test results covering the whole NC, does not give us a breakdown on pupils’ scores on different aspects of maths, and I’ve asked the researchers if this can be done.
Professor Francis now says that a more nuanced approach is required. She is correct, but we also need more flexibility. Dame Alison Peacock says that children’s abilities are not fixed, and there are plenty of cases to prove her point, including a colleague who found themself in the C stream of a secondary modern, and who has a PhD from Imperial College. Her approach to maths in Creating Learning Without Limits, offers three levels of challenge, from which children could choose, with appropriate guidance, moving between them as appropriate. In the early 90s, I did something similar in a primary school in English, teaching the children with literacy problems in one group, while the class teacher taught the others. I also ran a specific course on tables in Y7 of a secondary school, using assessment from Grace Fernald’s work, and speeding things up with a good computer programme that counted apples to be put into a cider press. This took two of the pupils’ maths lessons each week, and so did not deprive them of other aspects of the syllabus. A project in Basildon, directed by Sir Mike Tomlinson some years ago, used closely-focused activities, for children with learning difficulties and their parents, to provide a structured introduction to learning in the school environment, with a focus on language development, followed by reading groups matched to children’s difficulties and developing skills.
Nuance is important, but, as Bill Broderick and Mike Tomlinson showed, we also need flexibility. One size never will fit all, including, I suspect, those of us reading or writing this. A final word of appreciation for the researchers. They took care to match the samples of pupils in each group as closely as possible, and did not feel the need for “randomisation”, an technique borrowed from some aspects of medical research by academics determined to discredit the Clackmannanshire work on phonics by hook or by crook. They did not succeed, and the sampling in this study shows that that particular exercise was an expensive red herring.