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Groupings and reasons for grouping: details

Even in these project schools, with a commitment to raising achievement for lowest attaining students, internal staffing reasons and shortage of qualified teachers meant that two of the lowest attaining groups in the project were taught by teachers with less commitment to the project and fewer mathematics qualifications. However, some of these teachers had longer and more varied teaching experience on which to draw than their younger and more highly qualified colleagues.

A problem for our research is that for some of these groups we have very little information about the teaching, because one teacher did not agree to be researched for the project, and another eventually agreed but took a very long time to do so, so opportunities to collect data were limited. However, not all our focus students were in these particular groups and we do have data about others.

We interviewed all teachers who had agreed to be in the project for year 7 during year 8 because several focus students were in classes that all teachers described as 'broadly mixed-ability', whether these were described as sets or mixed-ability groups, to continue our overview of practice. However, it is a problem that we have more information about how average students were taught than the lowest achieving after year 7. Fortunately it is still possible to gain a view of department ethos and common practices.