Sign In
Sign In
Register for Free

Does primary ability grouping keep children stuck where they are?

Once we place children in a low-ability group, they may never escape, says Rachel Marks…

Rachel Marks
by Rachel Marks
Paddington Bear whole school resource pack
DOWNLOAD A FREE RESOURCE! Paddington Bear – Whole-school lesson plans & activity sheets
PrimaryEnglish

Zackary is in the bottom maths group in Year 4. He and the other pupils in his class are working their way through a sheet of addition calculations, without conferring. Zackary is working on ‘57 + 32 =᾿.

The children are told to use cubes, first working out ‘7 + 2’ and then ‘5 + 3’ (ignoring place value). Zackary knows these sums without needing cubes, so he answers the questions quickly and correctly.

When, excitedly, he tells the teacher that he᾿s finished, he is asked whether he used the cubes. He didn᾿t – and so is told to go back and do the work again, this time using the resources supplied. Unhappy with the response, Zackary doesn’t do this. Instead, he uses his cubes to build a lightsabre and silently ‘attack’ another child. The teacher notices and chastises him, saying “That’s not what we use the cubes for.”

Restrictive approaches

In primary schools, the use of ability grouping is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in maths. The problem is that children like Zackary – those placed in the bottom groups – rarely progress to the higher sets. Why, then, does it appear so hard for these children to make an escape? Zackary, as with many children in bottom groups, was expected to use manipulatives (in this case cubes) for his calculations. This fits good practice and key educational theory, so what᾿s the issue?

The problem is that approaches such as counting out cubes restrict the mathematics with which a child can engage. You are not going to calculate 484 ÷ 4 by counting out 484 cubes, so the questions the children are given usually involve smaller numbers. This in turn prevents them from learning to work from derived facts – thinking about what they already know and could use.

When the children move on to written methods, the use of cubes potentially leads to misconceptions around place value, forcing children to see the ‘5’ in 57 as ‘five’ – because they count out five cubes – rather than 50.

Without a sound understanding of place value, it becomes a struggle for children like Zackary to understand more complex mathematical concepts. They are forever stuck in the bottom group. Often, it is not only the children in lower sets who lack confidence in maths; common practice in primary schools is to assign the least confident teachers, or a TA, to these groups, meaning children may have limited access to someone who can identify and support gaps in their knowledge.

Behavioural assumptions

It is notable that the only interactions in Zackary᾿s class were between children and the teacher. There is an assumption that ‘low-ability’ children may also have issues with behaviour, and as such it is common to see peer discussion and collaboration – despite this being known to enhance mathematical development – limited in bottom groups.

Of course, Zackary’s frustrations led to him enacting behaviours that reinforce the link between ‘low ability’ and poor behaviour – but we could perhaps argue that these behaviours would not have happened had he been less restrained in the maths to which he had access. All of these things combine to create very different experiences for children in different groups. This, combined with ability grouping fitting the social belief (possibly heightened by these children’s parents) that some people can ‘do’ maths while others can’t, may go some way to explaining the lack of movement between groups and why children appear to become ‘stuck’. None of the teachers’ actions in this example were conducted out of malice, far from it. Techniques such as the use of small numbers and the requirement to use cubes were intended to be supportive – the limiting impact on children᾿s mathematical development was not considered.

While it may be easy, comforting even, to attribute a lack of movement to fixed low-ability, perhaps we need to look at little deeper at how common classroom practices – particularly those used when grouping – may, unintentionally, be keeping children stuck at the bottom.

Rachel Marks worked as a primary teacher for five years and is now a senior lecturer in mathematics education at the University of Brighton.

The classroom examples in this article are drawn from Rachel᾿s book, Ability-grouping in Primary Schools – Case Studies and Critical Debates, available now from Critical Publishing

You might also be interested in...