Streaming in Schools

[watervole]

I'd hate to say whether streaming in schools is a good thing or a bad thing (lots of arguments on both sides), but I am confident that streaming at age 7 is wrong.

Why?

This article.

The key point for me is that autumn-born children are more likely to be in the top stream.  Now this is clearly an effect of these children being the oldest in their class when they start school.  They aren't more intelligent, they merely have a timing advantage.

As children are likely to remain in a given stream once they get into it, I don't think streaming should start until summer-born children have caught up with autumn-born children.  (Does anyone know what age that is likely to happen by?  Does the effect ever even out?  Should we have school intakes at different times of year?)

Comments

[https://profiles.google.com/baildon.research]

Replying to your last question only, as posed, what you really mean is whether schools should educate in age cohorts with a granularity of (for example) six months rather than one year.

If you really meant simply 'intake' then that would just make things even worse. Younger kids would be expected to fit into a class of older, significantly more developed, kids that have already received six months of education and have been together as a social unit for that length of time. This was how it worked many years ago (I don't have to remind you how long ago that was) when children were started in infants' schools at the beginning of the term in which they reached five years.

I'm not sure there is a good organisational answer to this very real problem. More likely to work is to make teachers aware that this problem is real and task them with compensating for it (sadly, most of them have been in complete denial about this since the dawn of time -- like they are in denial about endemic assaults, harassment and intimidation, or "bullying" as it is know by its apologists. Oh, and clearly it's a reasonable hypothesis that "bullying" is linked to age disadvantage. Research, anyone? No, too soon really, we've only been doing universal education for 140 years.

[naath]

My mother used to be heavily involved in the marking of the 11+ in Essex and they (at least used to) weighted results by exact age because of this effect. I don't know if it persists in GCSE or A level results.

[watervole]

Interesting. If it's still present at the age of 11, then it's a non-trivial problem.

[undyingking]

That's interesting! I did the 11+ in Essex and was very young for my year… wonder if that's how come I passed.

Even if not used at GCSE and A-level, presumably it would be a significant effect in the KS1 and KS2 sats.

[keris]

This was (part of) the point with comprehensive schools, to do away with streaming and have classes by ability (on an individual subject level, so a kid might be great at reading but need help at languages, or whatever)[1]. This is actually even more important in later schools which often source their intake from a number of different schools with different emphases.

'Streaming' is based on the old idea that a person's educational 'grade' can be represented by a single number, some sort of aggregate. Which was why my mother was denied doing German or Latin or Greek, in spite of being top of the class in French and English, because she was poor at maths.

The problem with having classes by ability, of course, is the usual one -- money. It needs smaller class sizes and more classrooms and teachers because of scheduling problems. And it needs more work in trying to sort out timetables. Far easier to just assign a kid to a class where they will likely stay for the rest of their school life, and then treat all the kids in that class the same.

School intakes at different times of year? They used to do that when I entered school, I don't think it made any difference. The only way that would help is if you then had the school year staggered as well (so they always got a full year). But if you are doing that you might as well have ability grouping anyway, and forget about age (which is actually a lot less of a factor than many other societal ones, like the education and wealth of the parents).

I can see a plausible effect on children from when they were born in rural communities, though. For instance, a child born in the autumn would likely have a mother who was well fed for the last part of the pregnancy, whereas one born in spring the mother may have been short of food (or fresh food). I would suspect that things like that would influence the development of the child. But in urban and highly developed rural societies that will probably be minimal.

[1] It didn't work, because almost all 'comprehensive' schools were either a mashup of existing schools ("let's close one of the schools and put them together and call it a comprehensive!") or in some areas were just the old "Secondary Modern" schools renamed with the cream sucked off by the 'grammar' schools. Very few of them actually had the resources to implement a change in streaming practices. Those which did were good, but the majority gave the idea a bad name because it was never implemented properly (in other words a typical government programme).

[ranunculus]

I was a January baby, which is right around the American cutoff for admission to school. Mom chose to hold me back a year and let me start as one of the oldest children in the class. I cannot imagine how I would have kept up if I'd started earlier. As it was it still took me a couple of months to learn to read, despite significant help at home (significant learning disabilities).

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that streaming in primary school is not a good thing but I do think there is a need for streaming at post 11. As a product of the 11 plus, I went to Grammar School I am not advocating the return of that form of streaming as I know form my school days some children mature later than others, we had several 13 plus transfers from Secondary school, but I do think at this age streaming is a good idea. In the larger classes of Secondary schools(are they still larger, there were about 4 primaries to every secondary in my day) the teacher must chose to either teach to the brightest or the least bright section of a mixed class. Both options leave a part of the class bored and probably disruptive. Streaming by subject would be preferable to by general intelligent, as from personal experience a person even in childhood has there strengths and weaknesses. I was very good at biology, Chemistry and English lit OK at the other subjects and hopeless at physics, the arithmetic part of maths and German. But because my IQ tested high I was streamed in the highest class and really struggled at my bad subjects. I'm sure I was not the only one and that that would be just as true today.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Being basically quite clever but lazy and a bit uncooperative at school I benefited from a grammar school education because I was always content to amble along roughly in the middle of my class. However being in the middle of the top stream in a grammar school still put me ahead of the crowd. I got my education in spite of myself. I'm pretty sure that if I'd been in a lower stream I would still have done just enough work to stay in the invisible middle. Grammar school was good for me.

Not so good for BB. My husband was a late starter. He didn't even know what the 11+ was when he was given a pen and an exam paper to fill in. (That's also down to the preparation from his school which seems to have been appalling.) So he ended up in a secondary modern school and left just before his 15th birthday (August baby.) It was only his music - he was playing cello by then - and a very progressive music teacher that got him into Huddersfield Tech (always a great music school) which started him on the exam route which his sec. mod school had ignored. It took a few years longer, via tech, working and part-time studying then going back into full time education, but he ended up with a post-grad teaching qualification. Streaming at age 11 put him into the wrong place (and there was no 13+ movement between schools in Barnsley at that time).

If you had to put the two of us side by side, I've still got more general knowledge stored in the recesses of my brain and I'm better at spelling etc., but he's much better at critical thinking, problem solving and generally reads people and situations better than I do. We both write, but I write prose and he distills what he wants to say into a few short verses of a song. In fact, sometimes his few short verses say more than my 120,000 word novel.

I think I'm saying that streaming works for some but not for others. Or maybe I'm saying that streaming only works well when those in the lower streams are given as good an education (suitable to their needs) as those in the upper ones. Subject streaming in comprehensive schools, so kids are exactly where they need to be, would seem to be the answer - but it's all down to the individual teaching and (hidden) abilities being spotted in children by perceptive staff. The expectation at BB's school (and this was said to them) was that they were factory fodder. BB's maths teacher once said: Don't bother about fractions, you'll not need them when you're working down the pit! I'd like to strangle that man.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

That was what SecMod schools were all about50 years ago in my part of the world(Industrial South Wales)but Monmouthshire County Council, as it was then, still had the 13 plus escape hatch for the late bloomers. In the Secondary Moderns pushed out boys with enough education to read their pay slips from the pit or the steel works and girls that were good enough to be secretaries.
And yes whatever stream you are in the education you are given has to be as good as possible for the abilities in that stream. Sadly I don't think that will happen.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It was even more difficult in Barnsley to move from sec. mod to grammar school because we had an extra layer of 'central' schools which were 'technical' and effectively halfway between. Kids going there might expect to end up with a job as a plumber or electrician or typist or nurse (in the days when you could become a nurse with only 2 O levels). The central school kids were clever but probably not academic. They would be expected to try for O Levels - but if any wanted to stay on to sixth form to do A Levels they had to go to one of the three grammar schools. We had about half a dozen Central school kids move into our sixth form year, but that's the first transfer I can remember. If anyone moved up from a sec. mod. at 13 it would likely be to a central school, not all the way up to a grammar school.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Streaming by subject is not streaming -- that is 'setting'. 'Streaming' means a child is in the same stream across all subjects.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

The effect never evens out. See Malcolm Gladwell in What the Dog Saw, for a discussion of how it actually gets worse. It's particularly bad in sports where the issue is the development of physical co-ordination which really does relate to age, being used to indicate talent, and then far more time being spent on those "talented" players.

I am a July birthday and still carry the penalties of always feeling a little bit behind.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm a September birthday and was always rubbish at sports.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Streaming works well if it is done well. If it's not done well then it is just as crap as any other system that isn't implemented well.

I went to a modern comprehensive late '70s, early '80s; it had five years each with ~200 pupils in six forms. Streaming was by subject: you could be in top set for maths and bottom set for English, though this was unusual. In the first two years each year was split into two, the latter three years the streaming was done across the whole year. At the end of each year each stream in each subject was reassessed; it was also possible, though not often, to change stream mid-year.

I think I was streamed well; I certainly followed pretty much everything I was taught. Most of my fellow class members seemed to do so too after not too much explanation.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Streaming by subject is not streaming -- that is 'setting'. 'Streaming' means a child is in the same stream across all subjects.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Streaming as I described it was what was called streaming at my school, so I guess we'll just have to beg to differ.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Sure, although the article watervole is discussing cites "the distinction between setting - where children in mixed ability classes are grouped for different subjects according to their level in that particular discipline - and streaming, where pupils are placed into different classes on the basis of a judgement about their overall academic ability." – so I think it makes the conversation a bit easier to follow if people generally go along with that rather than using their own unusual variant definitions.

[izhilzha.livejournal.com]

This is why I advocate homeschooling for those who can. /tongue-in-cheek

(I actually do, but I know a lot of people still have a lot of reservations/prejudices about that sort of schooling, and it's not a solution to mass education problems anyway.)

[happytune.livejournal.com]

The evidence suggests that the set you get put into for any of what used to be called the 'core' subjects (i.e. English, maths and science) is the set you'll stay in for the rest of your schooling. And that's before you control for things like gender and socio-economic class, when the effect worsens.

This, in itself, is sufficient justification to get rid of streaming /until a way can be found to do properly and consistently across the education system/.

[thebobby.livejournal.com]

The comprehensive school I attended streamed - it did three streams, one for Maths, one for English, and one for everything else.

Given the difficulties that differing abilities gave in streamed classes, I can't imagine how a non-streamed solution is better for anyone. At least, with the class sizes of the time. There just is not time for individuals, which is unfortunate.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Several of your commenters seem to be confusing streaming with setting. As the linked article makes clear, there is a "… distinction between setting - where children in mixed ability classes are grouped for different subjects according to their level in that particular discipline - and streaming, where pupils are placed into different classes on the basis of a judgement about their overall academic ability."

While there are valid arguments pro and anti setting, I don't think there is any good case for streaming. That streaming's only supporter in that piece is the abominable Chris Woodhead says all that is needed about it.