ABSTRACT
Our ‘Best Practice in Setting’ intervention set out to remove some of the ways in which setting causes harm to young people and so improve equity in setting practice. In this chapter we show that schools struggled to comply with the requirements of our intervention, either because they found them too hard or because they did not perceive them as different to their current practices. We consider the elements of our intervention: setting arrangements, movement of pupils between sets, allocation of teachers to sets, and high expectations for all pupils; and reflect on why schools many appear to have found these difficult to apply. We uncover some of the barriers to good setting practice, including timetabling and identifying issues in existing practice, and argue that schools need truly to prioritise pupil needs if changes to setting are going to benefit equity.
