ABSTRACT
In the UK there is a long tradition of grouping by ‘ability’ – a practice founded upon the idea that students have relatively fixed levels of ability and need to be taught accordingly. In the 1950s, almost all the schools in the UK were ‘streamed’ – a process by which students are segregated by ‘ability’ and taught in the same class for all subjects. A survey of junior schools in the mid-1960s (Jackson, 1964) found that 96 per cent of teachers taught to streamed ability groups. The same study also revealed the overrepresentation of working-class students in low streams and the tendency of schools to allocate teachers with less experience and fewer qualifications to such groups. This report contributed towards a growing awareness of the inadequacies of streamed systems, supported by a range of other research studies (most notably the longitudinal study carried out by Barker and Ferri, 1970) which highlighted the inequitable nature of such systems. Studies by Hargreaves (1967), Lacey (1970) and then Ball (1981) all linked practices of streaming and setting (whereby students are divided into different classes by ‘ability’ for individual subjects) to working-class underachievement.
