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Disagreements about the project in the second and third years

Towards the middle of the second year there were still some voices of dissatisfaction with department management in all schools, and these were the same teachers who expressed dissent in other areas. One teacher resented 'being told' how to teach in ways he had been using for 4 years already. Another resented 'being told' to teach differently. Yet another, in a school which had moved to some setting for year 8, described mixed-ability teaching as 'absurd' and said that offering students choices and a variety of methods was confusing.

One teacher in one school said, at the end of the second year: 'Not everyone agrees with bigger topic ideas, so it hasn't really worked' and said that tasks need to have a purpose. We have reported elsewhere that this shift to purposeful tasks was one of the general developments during the first two years of the project. In another school, two teachers raise doubts: 'I am not sure about project work; we are not used to teaching this way yet' and claimed that mixed-ability teaching had been a 'numbers game' rather than really for improvement in learning. Another claimed that 'mixed ability has had limited success'.

The nature of dissent varied throughout the three years of the project. After one year there were mutterings about lack of focus on 'the basics' and 'not all teachers are honest about what they are doing'. By the end of the second year the expectations were of more varied practices, and more varied tasks and ways of teaching, so teachers reported being more free to teach in a range of ways. Dissent came instead from a few individual teachers who claimed that results were not improving. Since we monitored a range of results (tests, SATs and sample interviews) we felt we were in a position to make our own judgements about results, but we did find that most teachers were happy to make unsubstantiated claims about their groups, and that most of these claims where positive and based on perceptions of higher levels of motivation and participation of all students than was the case in other years (for actual results in KS3 SATs click here). KS3 results, both overall and for the PLAS, are good compared to previous years. In the case of SP improvement was dramatic.