– Dr Becky Taylor

The ‘Grouping Students’ team has been at the seaside this week, attending the 2017 conference of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) in Brighton. We shared early findings from tour project in a symposium on Tuesday afternoon. Along with mathematics educator, mixed-attainment teaching expert and friend of the project Tom Francome (University of Birmingham), Becky Taylor and Jeremy Hodgen presented findings relating to mixed attainment teaching: why schools don’t do it, what the benefits can be and how some schools buck the trend and make it work.

Becky Taylor shared findings from the pilot and recruitment stages of our project, explaining that we had found schools reluctant to engage with mixed-attainment teaching. Interviews with heads of subject led us to interpret this as a vicious circle, where the lack of models and exemplars mean that there is little evidence available to schools that mixed-attainment can be successful. This leads to scepticism and fear that mixed attainment teaching is too difficult. This fear discourages schools from using mixed-attainment – and so there are few exemplars and the cycle continues. For more detail, read our paper here (open access).

Tom Francome reviewed evidence from his own work, a comparison of two mathematics departments: one using mixed attainment grouping and the other teaching in sets. There were striking differences both in student attitudes and teacher approaches. Students and teachers in the mixed attainment school had stronger growth mindset: they believed that they could improve their attainment in mathematics through effort. Teachers in the mixed attainment school had stronger ‘connectionist’ beliefs about mathematics – beliefs that have been shown to be a feature of more effective mathematics teachers (Askew et al 1997). Tom’s research shows that where mathematics departments buck the trend and teach in mixed attainment groups, they can provide positive examples of mixed attainment teaching that could help break the vicious circle.

Jeremy Hodgen presented evidence from three ordinary schools that participated in the Best Practice in Mixed Attainment project. In each school the heads of department were very strongly, and publically committed to mixed attainment teaching as a way of improving equity. Jeremy argued that while strong values support mixed attainment teaching, they are not sufficient. In addition, subject leaders used a ‘winning them over’ strategy, treating the change to mixed attainment teaching as one aspect of a wider vision of improving learning and pedagogy.

Becky Francis responded to the presentations and chaired a thought-provoking discussion, with questions asked about classroom practices, the role of teaching assistants, mastery learning and the evaluation of our Education Endowment Foundation-funded project. We have also been enjoying reading the debates sparked on Twitter by coverage of our work in Schools Week and the TES.

– Dr Anna Mazenod

Nyhaven, Copenhagen, photo by Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0

The beautiful city of Copenhagen provided a lovely setting for this year’s ECER conference convened through EERA (European Educational Research Association). Well attended by educational researchers from all over the world, we were pleased to have the opportunity to showcase our project at the conference.

Dr Anna Mazenod at ECER

The symposium we convened at the conference presented research on attainment grouping from Belgium (Flanders), Finland and New Zealand alongside some early findings from our project based in England. Our symposium presentation focused on emerging findings from the teacher survey and interview data from schools participating in the Best Practice in Setting project, drawing out the reasons and justification for setting commonly deployed by teachers in England. Our key finding here is that ‘ability’ grouping in secondary schools is often seen as ‘the first port of call’, and particularly in mathematics viewed as the ‘normal’ approach to grouping with no credible alternatives.

This finding was echoed in Professor Martin Thrupp’s (University of Waikato) discussion of primary schools in New Zealand where teachers tend to view ‘ability’ grouping as an unproblematic practice. His pictures of the ‘data walls’ commonly used in primary school classrooms to chart individual students’ progress generated many questions and comments from the audience about the potentially detrimental impact of these practices on young people’s identities and their learning.

In her symposium presentation, Sarah Thys (University of Ghent) explained how tracking works in Flanders and how teacher recommendations play an important role in the transition from primary to secondary school. Furthermore, she showed that individual school allocation procedures impact on whether a student pursues a vocational or an academic track in secondary school.

An example of an indirect form of ‘ability’ grouping was provided by Professor Piia Seppänen (University of Turku) in her presentation of emerging findings from research in Finland conducted by Piia and colleagues including Sonja Kosunen and Anna-Leena Riitaoja (University of Helsinki). Despite the Nordic ideology of ‘one school for all,’ these indirect forms of ‘ability’ grouping are generated through a system of selective classes operated in some schools and municipalities in Finland, and can lead to labelling by teachers and other students.

Whilst there are significant differences in the form of ‘ability’ grouping that takes places in these four education systems, Professor David Hurst (University of Rochester), the discussant for the symposium noted interesting parallels in how direct and indirect processes of grouping students by ‘ability’ exacerbate social inequality. He further suggested that Amartya Sen’s capability theory might be a fruitful approach for teachers and schools to overcome the detrimental impact of ‘ability’ grouping for students, e.g. by placing importance to promoting students’ well-being as a goal in its own right.

We look forward to presenting further findings from our project next week at the BERA conference. See you there!

The fantastic sketchnote by Oliver Caviglioli (reproduced here with kind permission) on Professor Becky Francis’s attainment grouping presentation at researchED York 2017 at Huntington school.

Oliver was a principal of a special school for a decade and has co-authored a number of books on visual teaching strategies. His profile page on the ‘Learning Scientists’ website website can be accessed here.

– Dr Anna Mazenod 

The Best Practice in Grouping Students project team were delighted to be amongst the winning applicants for funding from UCL’s ‘Global Engagement Fund‘ 2017-18. Research Associate Dr Anna Mazenod arranged and chaired earlier this month a half-day international symposium on ability grouping with the funding. We were pleased to see so many national and international colleagues take part in the discussions on ‘ability’ and attainment grouping practices. Speakers included our Project Director Professor Becky Francis and Project Co-Investigator Professor Louise Archer who were joined by Professor Pascal Bressoux (Université Grenoble Alpes), Professor Piia Seppänen (University of Turku) and Dr Sonja Kosunen (University of Helsinki) to present a comparative perspective on English secondary schools from Finland and France.

Our Finnish colleagues Piia and Sonja explained to us how ability groupings operate indirectly in the Finnish education system. Mixed-attainment classes are the norm and the practice of grouping by ‘ability’ has been formally abolished. In some urban areas where school choice has been introduced students can however apply to attend selective secondary school classes that emphasise e.g. maths, languages, music or sports more than in the core curriculum. In the Finnish city of Turku, 37% of 13-year olds for example attend a selective class. Student selection for these classes is undertaken through subject-specific aptitude tests. Many schools then apply the groups generated from these selective subject classes across the whole timetable. Thus groupings generated from admission to selective classes can lead to de facto ‘ability’ streams within some schools.

We learnt that in France mixed-attainment classes are also the norm for students up to the age of 16. Tracking is introduced aged 16 with students either pursuing education in academic-track institutions or vocational-track institutions. Formally the education system is meant to be all about Equalité (equality) yet empirical research has identified that this is not realised in schools in practice. Teachers for example feel ill-equipped or resourced to deal with low attaining students in their mixed-attainment classrooms, and some have called for tracking to be introduced pre-16 to reduce the degree of heterogeneity within classes.

Common themes across research undertaken in each of the three countries point to the potentially stigmatizing impact of grouping practices on learners. This is particularly concerning where student placement into specific ‘ability’ or attainment groupings is influenced by factors other than those strictly pertaining to the subject-specific ‘ability’ or attainment. An example is the practice of streaming, whereby a student is allocated to an ‘ability’ group for all their classes based on their attainment in only one subject, e.g. maths or sports.

We hope to continue these discussions with our international colleagues as it is clear that the research agenda on ‘ability’ and attainment grouping practices is relevant across Europe, and beyond.

 – Professor Sue Hallam

There has been research on grouping pupils by ability for most of the twentieth century since Whipple carried out a study of the effects of special class placement on a group of high-aptitude 5th and 6th graders in the USA in 1919. Since then hundreds of studies have been undertaken and there have been many literature reviews and syntheses of research findings.

In the UK, historically, streaming was the dominant form of grouping. Typically, children were placed in a class based on their general ability by the age of seven and were taught in this class for all lessons. Children in the top stream were entered for the 11+ examination and were groomed to go on to grammar schools. The remaining children went to secondary modern schools with deleterious consequences for their future occupations. During the 1960s and 1970s with the introduction of comprehensive education, the demise of the 11+, and an increasing emphasis on equal opportunities streaming began to decline. This trend was supported by research indicating that structured ability grouping had no significant effect on overall attainment and had negative personal and social consequences for pupils in the lower streams.

Following the Education Reform Act (1988), the 1990s saw the implementation of the National Curriculum and an emphasis on raising standards. Ability grouping in the form of setting, where children from different classes are grouped by ability for certain subjects only, was perceived as a way to raise attainment. This was reinforced by the White Paper Excellence in Schools which suggested that ‘setting should be the norm in secondary schools. In some cases it is worth considering in primary schools’.  Since then streaming and setting have increased in primary schools and highly structured ability grouping continues to be the norm in secondary schools.

Underlying policies related to streaming and setting are fundamental assumptions about the nature of intelligence. Historically, IQ was viewed as genetically determined and immutable. Recent research has challenged this view showing that almost no genetic polymorphisms have been discovered that are consistently associated with variation in IQ in the normal range. Malleability in IQ has been demonstrated by adoption studies and neuroscience has provided extensive evidence of the brain’s plasticity.  Increasingly, the development of self-regulatory and other noncognitive skills is seen as important in developing high level intellectual capacity. Particular attention has been given to the concept of mindset.  Individuals holding an ‘entity’ mindset believe that IQ is fixed and cannot be altered whereas those with an ‘incremental’ mindset believe that they can increase their abilities through effort. Mindsets influence the way that individuals learn. Those holding entity beliefs have lower self-efficacy, are more likely to give up when facing difficult tasks, and adopt ineffective strategies which are reflected in neural responses in coping with failure and negative feedback. Research has shown that mindsets can be changed when learners are taught about the neuroplasticity of the brain and its potential for change and re-organisation. Small changes in mindset can have a substantial impact on attitudes and motivation for learning.

The adoption of highly structured ability grouping in schools, particularly as movement between groups is rare, sends a message to students and their parents that the ability to learn is fixed. This places a limit on expectations and leads learners to categorise themselves as having particular levels of intelligence which in turn has an impact on self-beliefs. This is reinforced by the pedagogy adopted by teachers when they teach different ability groups, the resources available and the allocation of the best teachers to the highest ability groups. The increase in highly structured ability grouping at early ages in the UK, which limits the attainment of those in the lower groups, means that children’s career trajectories are determined in the earliest years of primary school. If schools want to raise standards they need to adopt flexible approaches to grouping which promote positive self-beliefs and incremental mindsets supporting children’s learning and motivation.