Reassessing 'Ability' Grouping

Improving Practice for Equity and Attainment

Becky Francis, Becky Taylor, Antonina Tereshchenko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429791185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Presenting original quantitative and qualitative data from a large-scale empirical research project conducted in British secondary schools, Reassessing 'Ability' Grouping analyses the impact of attainment grouping on pupil outcomes, teacher effectiveness and social equality.

Alongside a comprehensive account of existing literature and the international field, this book offers:

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• Rigorous conceptual analysis of data

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• A view of wider political debates on pupils' social backgrounds and educational attainment

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• A discussion of the practicalities of classroom practice

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• Recommendations for improved practice to maximise pupil outcomes, experiences and equity

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• Vignettes, illustrative tables and graphs, as well as quotes from teacher interviews and pupil focus groups

Addressing attainment grouping as an obstacle to raising pupil attainment, this book offers a distinctive, wide-ranging appraisal of the international field, new large-scale empirical evidence, and 'close to practice' attention to the practicalities and constraints of the classroom. Reassessing 'Ability' Grouping is an essential read for any practitioners and policymakers, as well as students engaged in the field of education and social justice.

1

INTRODUCTION

Cast your mind back to your first day at secondary school. Do you remember? The cacophony of noise and bigger children, and the feeling that everyone else knew what they were doing? A time of excitement and expectation, but also, of trepidation, vulnerability and anxiety. Imagine, then, that on arrival in your new school you found you had been separated from many of your friends from primary school, and placed for most of your classes with a particular group of students. You quickly learn from other pupils and teachers that this is the ‘low ability group’. What does that do to your self-perception, your feelings about school, and your expectations of the future?

You might think that this could dampen self-esteem, and even demotivate young people from learning. Whereas the converse might be true of those placed in top groups – their placement might affirm their achievement and boost self-perception. We shall show you in this book that this does indeed tend to be the case. However, in fact the scenario we have painted – of experience of attainment grouping for the first time at secondary school – is increasingly unusual. This is not because segregation by attainment has become less common. Quite the reverse. It is because the growing prevalence of ‘ability grouping’ in primary schools means that children will frequently have experienced it long before arrival in secondary school. In the UK, setting is now common for maths and English in the later primary years, and ‘ability tables’ are frequently employed from as early as Year 1: that’s five to six year olds. Often, teachers believe that young children don’t understand the significance of their ‘ability tables’ – sadly, the research shows that this is not the case.¹

Our research interests have focused on elements of social inequality in education, and their impacts on young people’s educational experiences, attainment, and constructions of self. A series of governments in England have sought to narrow the very large socio-economic gap for educational attainment – but with relatively scant effect. One of the well-evidenced reasons for this is the strong level of wealth inequality in England which provides young children with very different starting points on entry to school, for which schools will struggle to compensate. But gaps are shown to widen, rather than to narrow, through schooling. This is again partly explained by cumulative effects of the differential access to financial, social and cultural capital relating to education that families can mobilise. However, educational research has shown how these differing family resources and products of social background interact with the school system and classroom practice to impact pupil experiences and outcomes. And, how schools’ structures and classroom practices themselves can exacerbate such inequalities. Given that pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds are disproportionately concentrated in low ‘ability’ groups – and that pupils in these groups are shown to make less progress than their peers in higher attainment groups – could the prevalence of attainment grouping in the English education system be an example of a school practice that promotes social inequality?

Is segregation by attainment damaging our children and switching them off learning? Or is attainment grouping beneficial and necessary to facilitate the best learning outcomes? What does the research say? Does attainment grouping differentially impact different social and attainment groups? And why is it so prevalent?

This book seeks to answer these questions, providing a comprehensive, evidence-based account of the impact of attainment grouping on pupil attainment, confidence, and experiences at school; and its relative effects on different social groups. Drawing from the international research literature, and from our own large-scale study of different forms of pupil grouping practice, we will demonstrate how attainment grouping perpetuates social inequality in education, in relation to social background, ‘race’, and gender.

We also attend to mixed attainment grouping: a topic that has generated very little research attention. While some researchers have posited ‘mixed ability’ practice as the preferable alternative to militate against negative effects of attainment grouping, there has been little research into effective mixed attainment practice, resulting in a dearth of research evidence or teaching materials to support this approach. We feel that it is both unrealistic and irresponsible to expect teachers to adopt new practices with little evidence; and one of aims of the study reported in this book was to address that gap.

But before we proceed further, a note on language. You may already have noticed how we are placing inverted commas around the word ‘ability’. We do not subscribe to conceptions of ‘ability’ as ascribed and fixed: rather we see it as malleable, and prior attainment to reflect a range of societal factors that impact educational progress and outcome. This is not to deny that pupils may have different competencies and affinities in relation to the school curriculum, but these differ across and within curriculum topics, and may be explained by a raft of different factors. To ascribe categories to pupils at a single time point, and to imply that these accurately express a fixed and inherent level of ‘ability’, flies in the face of logic and science. Hence our use of inverted commas, and our reference where possible to ‘attainment grouping’ rather than ‘ability grouping’.

The different methods of attainment grouping will be elaborated in the next chapter.

Background

Grouping by ‘ability’ within education – or ‘tracking’, as it is called in the United States – has been a longstanding topic of controversy. Whether segregating students by school type, or within schools via different streams, sets or ‘ability tables’, segregation by prior attainment remains prevalent internationally. In England, the tripartite² system that overtly segregated pupils by school type largely gave way to comprehensivisation during the 1970s.³ The desirability or otherwise of between-school segregation is now back on the political agenda, given the Conservative Government’s commitment to the expansion of grammar schools. However, even for the comprehensive school majority, the title ‘comprehensive’ often masked continuing practices of segregation by prior attainment within schools – arrangements which have been actively encouraged as ‘good practice’ by different governments (Dracup, 2014; Francis etal., 2017).

And segregation by attainment – or ‘ability’, as it is often conceived – also meant segregation by social background. Working class students, and those from particular minority ethnic groups, have been consistently shown to be over-represented in low sets and streams (as they were similarly over-represented in secondary modern schools under the tripartite system). This might be seen to be unremarkable: after all, on average children from disadvantaged backgrounds are shown to be significantly behind their middle-class peers on entry to schooling. Unsurprising, then, that they predominate in low attainment groups. However, crucially, a substantial body of international research shows that once in these ‘low ability’ groups, students make less educational progress than their counterparts in higher sets and streams. In other words, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are placed in ‘low ability’ groups face a double disadvantage.

As we will outline in more detail later in this book, research shows that grouping by prior attainment is both socially divisive, and detrimental to students with low prior attainment – and that both these elements increase socio-economic gaps for educational attainment. Research, especially from the United States, has highlighted the impact on racial segregation and attainment gaps. Moreover, international meta-analyses show that there is no significant benefit of attainment grouping overall.⁴ Why, then, does ‘ability grouping’ remain so prevalent? We have argued that the reasons are partly political, and partly pedagogic (Francis etal., 2017). Previous research has been less good at disaggregating the various potential explanations for the lack of positive impact of attainment grouping, giving practitioners scant information with which to precipitate changes in practice. Moreover, as Taylor etal. (2017) show, teachers are impeded from developing mixed attainment practice by existing school cultures (including avoidance of risk, and overwork), lack of exemplars, and local factors (such as concerns for the views of middle-class parents).

It was these different controversies and our commitment to social justice – and therefore, to improving the educational experiences and attainment of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – that motivated the large-scale study reported in this book. The ‘Best Practice in Grouping Students’ project, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), sought to redress some of the challenges impeding impact in raising attainment for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and to fill existing gaps in the research literature on the topic of the impact of pupil grouping on outcomes. It is the most substantial and ambitious empirical project on attainment grouping on record, involving work with 139 secondary schools across England in a mixed methods study including two randomised control trials (RCTs). This book reports its findings, contextualised within broader political debates and research evidence on attainment grouping. We hope that it will be a valued resource for educationalists serious about educational improvement, pedagogical excellence, and social equality.

As a fundamental principle within our democratic national system, families from all backgrounds are supposed to have an equal stake in our public services; the vast majority of them paying the taxes that secure the continued provision of these services. On this basis, no one could argue that children ought not to be entitled to equality of access to quality education. Of course, many believe beyond this that society and schooling should involve an element of social redistribution that equalises life chances for young people fated to begin school with different material resources. In the UK, governments of all political colours have supported this latter principle to greater or lesser extents, the present government maintaining the socially redistributive Pupil Premium,⁵ for example. But this aside, entitlement to equality of access to (high) quality education should in any case be a fundamental assumption. Yet, attainment grouping (‘tracking’) has a bearing on provision, experiences and outcomes of schooling; and in a way that impacts particular pupil groups differently. This book is intended to show how, to what extent, and why; and to investigate how we might do better.

The structure of the book

The book begins with an extensive chapter providing the background on attainment grouping, and reviewing the existing research literature in relation to key questions, including:

• Why attainment grouping is adopted

• The different forms of attainment grouping, and associated terminology

• The international picture on segregation by attainment

• The effectiveness or otherwise of attainment grouping

• The effectiveness or otherwise of mixed attainment practice

• Attainment grouping and social in/justice (the impact of attainment grouping on social in/equality)

• Unanswered questions about attainment grouping

Building on the final section of Chapter 2 (unanswered questions), Chapter 3 presents a brief account of what our project set out to do and why; and the methodology. The explanation of the study includes detail on the two student grouping interventions that we applied in schools, the various sources of data, and other details of the study, including its limitations.

Chapter 4 will elaborate further the prior research findings on the impact of segregation by attainment on pupil outcomes and self-confidence, and present our findings from the study with regard to the two key trial measures of attainment and self-confidence in learning (for pupils subject to an intervention on setting). We discuss the research findings in relation to pupil social background. And where Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of attainment grouping on pupil outcomes (attainment and self-confidence), Chapter 5 looks at student perspectives, and the effect of grouping practices on pupils’ experiences of school. It will compare pupils’ experiences of attainment grouping and mixed attainment practice; and explore the impact of attainment grouping for pupils’ enjoyment of school. It will also present findings on pupil preferences for attainment grouping or mixed attainment practice, and the impact of pupil grouping on social relations within school. Again, findings will be discussed in relation to pupil social background.

Chapter 6 turns to teachers and teaching, exploring the ...