The Case For Mixed-ability Classes

Picture this scene. It’s an English literature lesson in a UK school, and the teacher has just read an extract from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with a class of 15-year-olds. He’s given some of the students copies of No Fear Shakespeare, a kid-friendly translation of the original. For three students, even these literacy demands are beyond them. Another girl simply can’t focus and he gives her pens and paper to draw with. The teacher can ask the No Fear group to identify the key characters and maybe provide a tentative plot summary. He can ask most of the class about character development, and five of them might be able to support their statements with textual evidence. Now two curious students are wondering whether Shakespeare advocates living a life of moderation or one of passionate engagement. As a teacher myself, I’d think my lesson would be going rather well if the discussion went as described above. But wouldn’t this kind of class work better if there weren’t such a huge gap between the top and the bottom? If we put all the kids who needed literacy support into one class, and all the students who want to discuss the virtue of moderation into another? The practice of ‘streaming’, or ‘tracking’, involves separating students into classes depending on their diagnosed levels of attainment. At a macro level, it requires the establishment of academically selective schools for the brightest students, and comprehensive schools for the rest. Within schools, it means selecting students into a ‘stream’ of general ability, or ‘sets’ of subject-specific ability. The practice is…