ABSTRACT
Group teaching in the non-streamed primary school is the normal and approved method in Britain. A recent study showed that almost 50 per cent of small junior schools grouped children for arithmetic and over a quarter for reading and English. The Plowden report, Children and their Primary Schools, advised that, in particular, teaching groups should be formed for ‘children who have reached the same stages in reading and computation’. But the Plowden committee saw one major danger in this form of organization: ‘Clear-cut streaming within a class can be more damaging to children than streaming within a school. Even from the infant school there still come too many stories of children streamed by the table they sit at, of “top tables” and “backward reader” tables.’
