The question of selection by ability is just about the most contentious issue in education policy. A great battle has been fought, not least in the Conservative party, over grammar schools. This once reduced Tony Crosland, the former Labour education secretary, to a fit of undignified swearing.
The argument goes on, by proxy, in the related discussions of streaming and setting. Whereas selection separates children into different institutions, usually at the age of 11, streaming divides them by ability within a school (for all subjects). The practice of setting is a more refined separation in which pupils are grouped by ability, subject by subject. A child may be in the second set for mathematics but the top set for English.
The practice of setting is widespread though not uniform in British schools. It is not, however, compulsory. Reports that the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, planned to make it so were quickly denied yesterday but there was no need for the denial. There is a good case for setting and no need for the government to shy away from taking the powers needed.
Strictly speaking, the mooted proposal would not make setting compulsory. Ms Morgan was proposing that the regulator, Ofsted, should not be permitted to grant an “outstanding” rating to any school that does not set its pupils. That is not all the way to compulsion but it would clearly be a strong incentive.
Setting is a clear aid to teachers because teaching classes with a wide range of abilities is more difficult than one that is more tightly grouped. Finding relevant material for a class of unequal capacities is troublesome. Inspiring oversized classes of recalcitrant GCSE students speaking a variety of mother tongues to engage with, say, a Shakespeare play, must be hard enough. Why make it even harder for that teacher by asking them to cater, simultaneously, for a student with the potential to get a top grade, and a student for whom a solid pass would be a proud achievement?
Advertisement
The case for mixed-ability teaching is that the attainment of the less able pupils is raised by their proximity to the cleverer ones. The evidence on this proposition is sketchy and, in any case, the brighter pupils should not be used as a means of helping the others. An Ofsted report in June last year showed that the most able students in secondary schools were underachieving. A key reason is that “schools do not routinely give the same attention to the most able as they do to low-attaining students”.
Setting can, in any case, be better for less academic pupils too. If lower sets are given good teachers and the smallest class sizes, then setting can be an efficient way of targeting resources at the pupils who need them most. This is a way of helping the least able pupils without consigning them to the bottom set for all subjects, which is how students are wrongly written off.
To dictate teaching policy to schools does seem like the sort of centralisation that the government has criticised. The previous education secretary, Michael Gove, made it an article of faith that headteachers should enjoy maximum autonomy. That did not stop him having strong views on the contents of the history curriculum, for example. There is always a balance between local and central authority and often a tension between the two. The case for setting is clear though, and the government should proceed as planned.