Secondary Schools and Selection
Peter Wilby of the Guardian writes about education standards in comprehensive schools and the relatively poor results of those from deprived backgrounds. Below, I’ll comment on one of Peter’s central ideas.
Secondary schools that have a "balanced intake" – a mix of rich and poor, able and less able – are the ones that do best. They raise the performance of the less able children and children from poor homes (not necessarily the same thing), with little or no detrimental effect on brighter children.
Read the article in full here.
Teachers are trained to handle students with varied temperaments, and abilities. Being able to manage a class with moderate to large variance in ability isn’t the same as maximising the potential of each pupil. I attended a fee paying selective school in which the average pupil would be more capable than someone chosen randomly. Even in such an environment differences in ability were clear.
At times, I only just followed what was being taught whilst some struggled and others were visibly bored by the teacher’s pace. In subjects such as mathematics this led to students being split into ‘sets’ of varying ability. Such divisions can be seen in schools of all types and suggest that the author is naïve in thinking diversity in ability is key. Depending on the difficulty of topic, diversity will lead to segregation. Perhaps the author has an idealised view of the world in which better pupils band together to help those who’re struggling; or maybe less capable pupils are inspired by the performance of others and double their work rate. Without meaning to sound too cynical my schooling experience suggests such cooperation would be limited in scale.
Teachers cannot easily spend time helping less capable students, whilst moving along fast enough for the median pupil and concurrently challenging the most able pupils. Homogeneity allows teaching that’s focused on the needs of the particular group; not split between the needs of many. It’s odd that the author’s idea of ‘best’ performance is limiting or accepting a small drop in the performance of the most able.
The truth is that if Labour really wants to improve social mobility, it has to be very bold indeed, perhaps using some kind of "banding" system that allocates fixed numbers of children of different abilities to each school, and possibly also a fixed quota of children on free meals. The old Inner London Education Authority had just such a system and it was abolished because the middle classes hated it. Labour may also have to introduce formal quotas to get more deprived children into elite universities.
Wilby's tacit acceptance that the potential of some students may be curbed is unacceptable and his suggestions (above) for improving the performance of the poor are naive. Wilby fails to address the source of motivation and culture within different types of school; a point I'll discuss in a later post.
04 Aug 2005 12:13
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7 comments by 1 or more people
[Skip to the latest comment]it makes me angry when people believe that children of all abilities can attend the same school without any streaming. Yes, a medium can be achieved in such academically varied classes, but nobody wants to be in a lesson where either the brighter pupils are bored or the less intelligent don't understand.
I went to 2 secondary schools- one comprehensive and one grammar, and the comprehensive school was one of the most difficult times in my life. As one of the brightest kids there I stuck out like a sore thumb. The teachers constantly set me extra work to try and hold me back in line with the rest of the class, but- more than that- every single time i got a decent mark some joker in the back of the class would start taking the piss out of me for being a boffin or something similar. It wasn't until I got to grammar school that I discovered where I truly fitted in academically, and actually started to feel I had a place in my class.
Sorry to rant, but it's a subject close to my heart!
04 Aug 2005, 13:31
Mavan
People who think that it is impossible to effectively teach to mixed ability classes have a really narrow understanding of teaching. Both this entry and the first comment talk of teaching as if it had to be teacher led. Not so. It is simply not the case that the only way to teach is by standing in front of the class and speaking to everyone. Teaching mixed ability classes using individualised learning schemes is a perfectly respectable way of organising schools, as anyone with any experience of teaching or learning in this fashion will tell you.
07 Aug 2005, 18:54
Nobody has claimed it's impossible, but rather that a mixed ability class won't allow each student to reach his or her full potential. My view and that of the first commenter is based on a dozen-plus years in the education system. I don't know anything about the individualised learning schemes you describe but to the extent that they require students to follow customised syllabi on their own without a teacher articulating and explaining what one needs to know, they wouldn't be feasible for all subjects, all the time.
07 Aug 2005, 22:02
Mavan
The idea that mixed ability classes won't allow each student to reach his or her full potential is one that is not supported by empirical research. The evidence suggests that mixed ability classes significantly raise achievement for lower ability pupils, and have minimal impact on high achievers.
Have a look at:
Boaler, Wiliam & Brown (2000), British Educational Research Journal 26(5) (link, might need a library PIN if you are off campus)
or
Venkatakrishnan & Wiliam (2000), 26th Annual BERA Conference (link)
08 Aug 2005, 15:08
In honesty, it’d be silly of me to comment on papers which are too long to warrant anything but a scan of the abstracts and conclusions. Doing that simply shows that results aren’t independent of the grouping mechanism, teaching methods used by teachers, their assumptions about ability, and attitudes of the children towards their segregation. These are faults of implementation rather than the logic behind the original argument. (I’m not digging my head in the sand here – 40ish pages is a lot!)
Take a world in which every student has his or her own personal tutor. Tutors know the strengths and weaknesses of their students and thus teach/provide work that generates progression at just the right pace. This tutor has time to answer as many questions as the student is willing to ask. How could such a system fail to generate better results than at present? Take away one tutor so that two random students must share; the system will still do better overall. By backwards induction, even a world with two groups should yield better results, however marginal. If it proves impossible to mitigate all the potential downsides described by the papers, then yes, mixed ability schools and classes should be considered the default. I doubt it’s impossible or even very difficult in all cases though.
A quick summary of why this small sample of the literature differs from papers which state the opposite and an explanation of individualised learning plans (and the level of teacher activity needed) would be genuinely appreciated.
08 Aug 2005, 20:50
Mavan
I would certainly want to dispute your claim that every student having their own private tutor is the best model for education. This rather depends on how you think people learn. The general consensus these days is that it is not just a case of transmission from teacher to student, but rather that the student needs to construct meanings for themselves; and that the success or failure of this depends to a large extent on the environment in which it happens. Discussions and informal talking with peers is certainly an important part of learning. As a clear cut example, I'm sure you must have been involved in a seminar group with too few people in it (although, given the state of this university these days, perhaps not!). I have, as both a student and a teacher. It's awful. Discussion is stifled and therefore so is learning. The same is true at school. I don't, therefore, accept your backwards induction argument.
You are also wrong to blame "faults of implementation" for the effect detected by Wiliam & colleagues. I would claim that "the grouping mechanism, teaching methods used by teachers, their assumptions about ability, and attitudes of the children towards their segregation" are a fundamental part of what setting is. How on earth could you hope to implement setting (or a mixed ability structure) without these factors being of critical importance? The only important question is: in general, over a large sample to allow the "faults of implementation" to even out, which form of class organisation does the evidence suggest provides the best opportunity for learning? Setting or mixed ability?
This isn't really my field, but my understanding was that there is a reasonable consensus (with a few dissenters) in the literature that the evidence suggests having setting in schools marginally benefits the most able, but significantly disadvantages those of average and of lesser ablities. There are some brief reviews of the literature in the papers I linked to above. You might want to argue that the marginal benefit to the most able is worth significantly disadvantaging the less able, but I wouldn't.
As for your question. An individualised learning scheme is a programme of work where the student is encouraged to work on their own at their own pace. The classic example of this would be the SMILE mathematics programme. This involved each classroom having a series of boxes of cards with activities on which the pupils worked through at their own pace. The teacher would then circulate and help and discuss with people through the lesson. Every now and then, they might do a whole group summary of a topic. Since there were far more activities than anyone could ever get through, there was no danger of "bright" children running out of things to do, or of getting bored. SMILE was fairly widespread and very popular with teachers during the 80s, and only went out of fashion when the government put more and more emphasis (with no research evidence to back it up) on whole class teaching. Naturally, of course, one of the aims of SMILE was to successfully allow mixed-ability classrooms in mathematics teaching. And it did do this, very successfully.
09 Aug 2005, 10:57
Emma Woodcock
Learning is not (or should not be) a passive experience, nor should it be a one way form of communication. Interaction with the teacher, the environment and with peers is central in a child's learning and cognitive development – an empirically grounded theory in developmental psychology (e.g. Piaget). I accept that if a teacher stands in front of a class of 30 pupils and talks AT them about a subject area, some children will not be intellectually challenged, and some will struggle to understand what is being said. However, as Mavan correcly points out, this is a narrow view of teaching, and the learning environment should be adapted to ensure that children can interact and develop to reach their potential as individuals. In this argument there should also be greater emphasis on the life skills that are learned through working with people from a diversity of backgrounds with a variety of strengths -academic or otherwise. The education system is a form of secondary socialisation, and should focus on teaching self motivation so that children push THEMSELVES to achieve their full potential through interaction with the environment and an inquisitive mind. From experience I know how successful mixed ability classes can be -with more able students helping to motivate and build the confidence of less able students, whilst learning invaluable people skills and without interfering with their individual academic development. There are a great number of problems with streaming by ability, as children develop at different rates, and even with the most flexible systems there can be problems with self fulfulling prophecies. It may sound idealistic, but with the right teaching methods I strongly believe that pupils of all abilities CAN achieve their full potential in mixed classes, and can learn more valuable, transferable skills than if they were surrounded by children of similar perceived intellectual ability.
09 Aug 2005, 15:25
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