Introduction

Since the late 1980s, the term ‘differentiation’ has increasingly entered the everyday usage of teachers and become a priority issue on many school development plans. Yet in the summer of 1994, when most of the co-authors of this book met together on an in-service education (INSET) course at the Institute of Education in Cambridge, a library research revealed only three books and a small collection of articles with ‘differentiation’ in their title. Of these, none provided any actual examples of practice and none asked the sorts of questions about differentiation that this group of teachers most wanted to raise.