There is a political consensus around putting children into sets according to their ability: that politicians believe they know what is best for schools. Michael Gove, when he was opposition spokesman on education, said, “Each pupil should be given the opportunity to learn in accordance with their particular aptitude and ability … we believe that setting by ability is the only solution to achieving this ambition.”
David Cameron, as leader of the opposition, said, “I want to see setting in every single school. Parents know it works. Teachers know it works. Tony Blair promised it in 1997. But it still hasn’t happened. We will keep up the pressure till it does.”
The Labour White Paper in 2005 was strongly in favour of it and Jacqui Smith, as schools minister, said: “Labour has encouraged setting, and there is now more setting than in 1997″.
The issue arose again this week when The Guardian reported that the new secretary of state for education, Nicky Morgan, was about to mandate setting by ability in secondary schools – a story she quickly denied. It now appears that Morgan has seen off what would have been a heavy handed centralisation of educational decision-making.
Helps higher achievers more
The research evidence on setting is nuanced. As long ago as 1998, my predecessor as director of the Institute of Education, Peter Mortimore, concluded that:
Setting in mathematics, accompanied by curriculum differentiation, may be a means of raising the attainment of the more able pupils. The effect is not great, however, and there are some costs in terms of the progress of pupils whose attainment is low at the end of primary school. The impact on pupils’ self-concept may be important in the longer term, influencing later attainment in the subject and decisions about choice of subjects after the age of 16. These factors must also be taken into account when formulating policy on ability grouping in schools.
It’s a measured, balanced conclusion: there are benefits, but most especially for higher attaining students. This finding is largely endorsed by the Education Endowment Foundation toolkit, which notes that: "ability grouping appears to benefit higher-attaining pupils and be detrimental to the learning of mid-range and lower-attaining learners.”
Like most complex professional issues, there are balances to be struck between the needs of different pupils, between short-term and long-term goals and between different curriculum areas.
Widespread already
The overall picture on practice in schools is complex. Almost all secondary schools use setting in parts of the curriculum. Almost all mathematics is taught to groups arranged on the basis of some measure of attainment. Analysis of cohort evidence suggests that the practice is widespread in primary schools but the organisational and curricular issues are complex. The long-term academic attainment of summer-born children may be hampered by their tendency to be allocated to lower sets.
Other evidence suggests schools’ practice in setting is cut across by other issues. There is a tendency to allocate less experienced teachers to lower sets, despite evidence from the US suggesting that the reverse is what is needed.
There are also tendencies for the teaching in lower sets to lack sufficient challenge and for pupils from deprived socio-economic backgrounds to be over-represented in these lower sets. The evidence of attainment used to allocate pupils to sets is often weak and inconsistent in nature, and issues around the frequency (or otherwise) at which pupils are moved between sets.
It would be extremely difficult – and very costly – for all but very, very large schools to set in all subjects: block timetabling means compromises have to be made. For both good educational and hard resource reasons, most schools adopt different grouping strategies for different parts of the curriculum at different age stages.
Setting doesn’t trump autonomy
All the politicians quoted at the beginning of this article have committed themselves to school autonomy. After extensive critique, Ofsted has abandoned any sense that inspectors should look for particular teaching approaches: schools should be judged on how well they perform, not how they organise themselves.
There is good, if complex, research evidence on grouping approaches, and excellent, developing practice on flexible grouping strategies.
If schools are to be operationally autonomous, then that’s what they need to be. The spat within government over setting suggests that there will always be politicians who find school autonomy challenging. But Morgan’s early commitment to work with the profession is encouraging.
This article is co-published with the IOE London blog.