‘Bottom sets are dumping grounds’: How school streaming impacts children

This week, parents of 10- and 11-year-olds in England will be submitting their choice of secondary school – and one issue on many minds is that of streaming. Most secondary schools, whether state, grammar or private, do some sort of setting, ability and attainment grouping to manage the different learning levels in the children arriving in their schools – and it often proves divisive. It can seem surprising – after all, aren’t comprehensives, well, comprehensive with children of all abilities taught together? For some parents, it can bring back the memories of the “bottom set” of their school days, viewed with either fear or humiliation, depending on whether they were on its inside or outside. For others, it’s a reassuring sign that their high-achieving child will be insulated from poor behaviour and be taught at an appropriate pace. Attitudes to setting and streaming often depend on where you think your own child will be sitting – few want to think that their child will be in the bottom set. “The reality of schools are that, frankly, I want my own kids to be in the top sets,” a secondary head teacher told me. “In north London, among my friends,” says the parent of a 10-year-old I spoke to, “it definitely adds to a school’s appeal if they talk a lot about how children are strictly divided up by ability. And we’re quite used to it – everyone knew that the classrooms in primary school were organised around tables with the worst on “triangle” table and the best on “dodecahedron” or whatever.” All of her friends, she says, assume that their child will be avoiding the bottom set. Shorts Professor Becky Taylor, professorial research fellow at University College London, says that “there has been a common conception that having some kind of attainment grouping is a sign of rigorous high standards in education”. But the reality is far more nuanced. Firstly, many parents are unsure of the difference between “setting”, where individual subjects are divided by ability, and “streaming”, where children are separated across the whole curriculum. Some form of setting is near universal, especially for maths. A 2018 survey Taylor worked on found that of the around 3,000 secondary schools in England, “only around 120 to 180 were using mixed-attainment groups for maths in year seven and eight” (when children are aged between 11 and 13). “And by the time you get to GSCE year, nearly everybody is setting, so, for maths teachers, mixed-ability teaching is something they very rarely experience.” According to Taylor’s findings, maths, modern foreign languages and PE were usually taught in ability groups, while subjects like English and the social sciences were far more likely to be taught in mixed-ability groups. Full-scale streaming is rarer: “In 2018, the schools told us that around 10 per cent of them were streaming at the beginning of Key Stage 3 [the start of secondary school].” Sammy Wright is the author of Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone, as well as the head teacher of a large secondary. He explains that whatever the official line, streaming can, in practice, be far more common than thought due to the logistical challenges of designing timetables. Some schools introduce “a grammar stream” for those at the very top or a much smaller group for those least prepared for secondary school, called – occasionally euphemistically – a “nurture group”. This has become more prevalent since Covid-19 when the attainment gap has widened. “Ability has become so stretched,” says Wright, “that those who are coming in unprepared for secondary are much worse than they used to be”. Setting children according to ability or attainment is more prevalent in this country than abroad, says John Jerrim, professor of education and social statistics at UCL’s Social Research Institute. However, in countries such as the US, Netherlands, Germany and Austria, it’s more common to separate children into completely separate schools according to their ability. Like every issue in education, ideological lines get drawn, with one side accusing the other of woolly liberalism and a race to the bottom, and the other pointing at the cruelty and biases baked into separating children. One research paper even claimed that setting was a form of “symbolic violence”. Given that most schools are using some form of setting, is it effective and what are its effects on the self-image of the pupils themselves? Taylor’s research looked at maths grouping and found that it had a small negative impact on low-attaining pupils and a small positive impact for the higher ones. “But it’s worth saying that these were all very small effects and there were other things, such as family background, that were making a bigger difference.” “One of the arguments made against setting and streaming,” says John Jerrim, “is that we might be ‘labelling’ children as lower achieving and while that’s true, the alternative is that they’re going to feel that anyway in a mixed-ability group when they don’t have a clue what’s going on. They’ll find that out whether or not you set them.” Sammy Wright agrees that, as with everything in education, it’s teacher dependent. “I can have a low set that’s very motivated and work really hard with a teacher that really believes in them to do their best. Equally, I can have a low set where the kids are put into it because of behavioural issues rather than ability and the teacher believes they’re bottom-set kids and won’t achieve.” Even if setting has no benefit in terms of outcome, it can have huge advantages in terms of process. Whether classes are taught in ability groups or not has “zero effect on average”, argues Jerrim. “But if you ask any teacher, it’s bloody hard teaching mixed-ability groups, especially in maths. So, zero effect on kids’ achievement, but quite a bit more workload for the teacher.” In fact, while parents may wring their hands about what setting does to their children’s self-esteem, the signs are that young people themselves are sanguine. Phoebe, 15, is in year 10 and says: “Of course, we all know which set we’re in, whether or not they tell us. I don’t care, so long as my teacher is good.” Finn, aged 22, was one of those put in a small lower-ability group for GCSE maths. Now, that’s he graduated from university with a first-class degree, does he feel he was underestimated at school? “No, not really,” he says. “It never bothered me. I got the best teacher, who was strict and who we all respected. I was one of the highest performers which made me feel more confident. Far worse to be in the large middle group with a bad teacher.” His mother agrees that the school never made the pupils for whom maths was more challenging feel like they should have lower expectations. “I was worried,” she admits, “but I spoke to teacher friends and they all said that any idea of the bottom set being a dumping ground was really outdated.”