– Becky Taylor

As I write I feel very aware that this is the last time but one that we will be wishing you a Happy New Year from the Best Practice in Grouping Students team.

New Year is always a good time to review our achievements, and 2016 really was a fantastic year for the project:

• We worked with 140 schools overall
• We delivered 18 professional development sessions
• We visited 11 schools to listen to students and teachers talk about their experiences of grouping practices
• We started to analyse questionnaire data from over 14 000 students and over 700 teachers
• We published two papers in academic journals, one on the lack of impact of research into attainment grouping and the other on schools’ reluctance to engage with mixed attainment grouping
• We presented our research at academic conferences in the UK (BERA) and Australia (AARE) and at practitioner and policy events, including ResearchED and the Westminster Education Forum
• We visited Finland to observe mixed attainment teaching there and meet with international colleagues working on grouping practices in schools
• We won prizes for our collaboration with schools on mixed attainment teaching and for our symposium presented at BERA
• And of course, following the appointment of our project director Professor Becky Francis as Director of UCL Institute of Education, we moved our project to its new home at UCL-IOE.

And now we are looking forward to 2017! The project has just over a year to go and we have just over 6 months left working with our participating schools. We still have a lot to do and it is going to be a very busy year.

We still have lots of data to collect from schools: we are planning to visit more schools to listen to students and teachers, and after Easter schools will be arranging for students and teachers to complete our questionnaires. NFER, who are evaluating the project, will be arranging for students to take Progress Tests in English and Mathematics. This will enable us to know what the impact of our interventions has been on students’ progress.

We will also be analysing data, writing articles and reports, presenting our findings at conferences and other events, preparing our resources to share them with schools and planning our own events to share the findings from the project.

We are very excited about the year ahead and look forward to sharing our news with you as the project moves into its final stages.

– Becky Taylor

We are delighted to announce that we have been awarded the 2016 BERA BCF Routledge Curriculum Journal Prize for work carried out in developing our intervention Best Practice in Mixed Attainment, which aims to ensure good practice in mixed-attainment teaching contexts.

If you have been following our project, you will know that research evidence suggests that students with lower prior attainment (often students from disadvantaged backgrounds) may do better if taught in mixed-attainment settings. Despite this, setting by ‘ability’ remains a very common practice in English secondary schools and schools are reluctant to take up mixed-attainment teaching. Our intervention aims to support schools with mixed attainment grouping, in order to raise attainment for these doubly-disadvantaged learners without detriment to higher attainers.

In 2014-15 we collaborated with colleagues at Plashet School, Hinchley Wood School and Kings Norton Girls’ School to explore their excellent mixed-attainment teaching practice and to develop curriculum materials that we are now using to support schools participating in our intervention. We drew on published research evidence and on pilot teachers’ prior practice and experience, working in genuine partnership together. In addition, the teachers provided curriculum exemplars to illustrate best practice.

At the end of the intervention period, we will be updating our materials and making them available to all schools. Look out for further information from summer 2017.

Thanks to the following teachers from our pilot schools, who contributed to the development of materials:

Margaret Antony, Vicky Barker, Dave Coglan, Carol Croom, Tom Francome, Katherine Hewat-Jaboor, Amandeep Kalote, Sue Morgan and Tim Smytheman.

Additional materials were provided by Clare Dawson (University of Nottingham) and Laurie Smith (King’s College London).

— Professor Becky Francis

It’s been a busy summer for the Best Practice in Grouping Students project team. The big news is that we’ve left King’s College London for a new home at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), following my appointment as the IOE’s new Director at the beginning of July.

I’m delighted to have been chosen to lead the Institute of Education, which is the most prestigious education institution in the world. Amongst my key priorities here are to ensure that the IoE’s excellence, innovation, and commitment to equity and civic engagement are reflected across every area, and that our world-leading work is recognised and drawn upon as a global resource.

Alongside these new responsibilities, I’m continuing as director of the Best Practice in Grouping Students project. I’m very pleased that the core project team has been able to move with me into the IOE’s building at 20 Bedford Way[1]. After a lot of packing and preparing during our final month at King’s, we arrived at the IOE on the 1^st July. My colleagues have been settling in over the summer and we are now set up and back in action at the start of this new term.

Our project’s research into the interplay between social identities, educational inequalities and schools’ use of attainment grouping continues as before. We’re also very much looking forward to the following events just around the corner:

• Our team are presenting at this year’s BERA conference in LEEDS, 13^th-15^th September [insert link to https://www.bera.ac.uk/beraconference-2016]. Keep in touch with presentations and symposia etc via @BERANews and ‪#BERA2016‪

• Delivering Autumn term professional development sessions in September and October at our hubs with our project teachers from both mixed attainment and setting schools

• Working on papers for journals and conferences, including the BSA annual conference 2017

• Visiting some of our schools for qualitative data collection

With all best wishes,

Professor Becky Francis

Please note that our contact details have now changed. You can now reach the project via:

Email: ioe.groupingstudents@ucl.ac.uk

Post: Best Practice in Grouping Students Project, EPS, UCL Institute of education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

Phone: 0207 612 6315

[1] The full project team continues to involve expert colleagues at Nottingham University (Prof Jeremy Hodgen), King’s College (Prof Louise Archer), and Queen’s University Belfast (Prof Paul Connolly and Dr Seaneen Sloan).

— Research Associate Dr Anna Mazenod

In our last blog we shared with you some of the key features of the Finnish education system. This was in preparation for our project team visit to my native Finland to observe teaching and learning in secondary schools. The three Helsinki schools (Taivallahden peruskoulu, Töölön yhteiskoulu and Helsingin normaalilyseo) we visited delivered teaching in mixed-attainment classes.

Over a two-day visit we observed five teachers in action in their classrooms. What struck us the most was the calm pace of the lessons and the relaxed attitude to learning. This relaxed attitude to learning was shared by the teachers and the students, and permeated the classrooms and the school corridors. What was also noticeable was the emphasis on ‘chalk and talk’, and the relatively unstructured lessons. In our brief discussions with the individual teachers all stressed the importance of encouraging independent learning, and seemed to view themselves primarily as facilitators of learning. This was in the context of classes that were relatively small in size (the largest class we observed had 23 students). The lack of national level assessments of learning until students are aged 17-18 was identified by some of the teachers as helping to create an empowering and stress-free school environment for students.

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— John Barlow

Ahead of our project team’s visit to observe lessons in schools in Helsinki, Finland; we looked at some of the key features of the highly regarded Finnish school system.

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