Foreign Perspectives

Streaming in schools is the separation of cohorts into two or more classes of broadly equal ability thus you typically get a low, middle and high ability class in each year. The alternative to this is mixed ability classes. Setting applies at the level of individual subjects thus a child might be in the middle ability class for most things, but move to either the high or low ability class for maths or English.

The advantages of streaming are that it lets teachers adjust the level of teaching to the ability of those within each ability range. Thus, the complexity of the topics will typically be higher in the high ability class than in the low ability one. Generally, the low ability class will have additional support requirements and these will be concentrated in that class. In the high ability class, lessons will tend to stretch the pupils. One downside of this structure is that the distribution of ability isn’t even and, in general, the high and low ability classes would ideally have about 1/4 of the pupils with the middle class having half of them so, in practice, there would be two middle classes. Unfortunately, schools don’t always have enough pupils to do that and would more generally run with three classes at most. The other notable downside of it is that those in the bottom class can get labelled as the dummies which isn’t fair as there are lots of reasons that they can be in that class and also because it’s not necessarily a permanent position for them. Setting is much the same and is essentially a fine tuning of the streaming structure.

Mixed ability classes avoid that stigmatism in that low, middle and high ability pupils will be in each class. Where it falls down is that the teaching tends to be towards the middle which is too high for those who’d otherwise be in the low ability class and too low (hence boring) for those who’d normally be in the high ability class. It avoids the motivation issue of having teachers constantly teaching the low ability class and often working very hard with no real progress from their pupils to show for it.

The kids primary school has been doing streaming and setting for P4-7 for around four years now, so the first of the kids who’ve worked right through that are at the point of moving to their next school. It was introduced by the previous principal and vice-principal (she’s leaving this year) and seems to have worked quite well. Unfortunately, the new principal is quite opposed to it and so they’re dropping it as from September which is a particularly bad time for our second little guy, so bad in fact that we are considering changing schools.

Why is it so bad? Well, the lower class has a tendency to be quite disruptive and that’s a major downside for teaching. Teaching in the school seems certain to end up teaching for the needs of those at the lower ability levels to the detriment of those of average or higher levels of ability.

Why are they doing it? It seems that the new principal just doesn’t like streaming and setting and the teachers lumbered with the lower classes have a hard time. What it doesn’t address are the needs of those of middle and higher abilities, many of whom will either be put off by the disruption or simply get bored.

It doesn’t even adequately address the needs of those at the lower ability or rather lower attainment levels. In the school, their problems include English as an additional language and general lack of parental support and encouragement. In families with English as an additional language it is both difficult for the pupil in school and for the parents in terms of homework and general interaction with the school – mixed ability classes will not help either. Lack of parental support and encouragement isn’t exclusive to immigrants, of course, and the school really needs to do all it can about that but mixed ability classes just average down the teaching and, if anything, discourage those at the lower end of the ability range who can easily come to see any progress as impossible when they’re surrounded by people miles ahead of them.

What really gets us is that they announced the new policy following a consultation where the majority of parents and teachers said that mixed ability classes would be best for their child. Except, that’s not what even their, highly misleading, statistics said. Taking the very same results, it can be argued that the parents and teachers want streaming and setting. And that’s even after an incredibly poor and biased analysis of the consequences of streaming and setting was distributed with the initial consultation questionnaire. Subtract the bias, add in some valid statistics and the result would have been quite different.

They won’t be restarting until 2016 but at least there is now light at the end of the tunnel.

At present they’re planning three:

1. MSc Contemporary Psychological Studies;
2. MSc in Forensic Psychological Studies; and
3. MSc in Criminological Studies.

Which isn’t a bad start and and complements some of their psychology undergraduate degrees though the social psychology and counselling undergraduate degrees don’t currently have a corresponding masters.

No details on pricing as yet but presumably they will be around the £4800 mark of the science masters.

A major downside is that they are not currently planning on having the degrees accedited. Although for BPS recognition as GBC, you only need to have done one accredited degree, for a range of psychology professions you would need to have an accredited masters as well so it would be best to check the requirements of the profession that you ultimately intend to use the degree for before signing up.

The other downside, for the OU, is that in their absence a range of other institutions have produced distance learning courses to address the gap in provision. So, for example, you can do the accredited MSc in Health Psychology from the University of Ulster for around £4000 (ie probably cheaper than the OU).

Last Monday was our first visit to Campbell with James as a pupil.

Slightly confusingly, since it’s a boys school, there were girls as part of the welcome party, basically on loan from Strathearn, the sister school. The headmaster kicked off the evening with his standard welcome speech (much the same as on the open night) highlighting the heights to which the boys should be striving. Then it was on to more prosaic things like the interaction they’d like between the parents, pupils and school before the boys were taken away with their tutor for an initial meeting and to see where they will need to go on their first day in August.

The tutor meeting was just a short get to know you meeting with their personal tutor who’ll be the person who’ll look after them for the next seven years. After their tea and bikkies, the parents were led down to meet the tutor and collect their sons. There’s not really that much that they have to say at this point and in reality it’ll be the first proper meeting with them in early October where we’ll really start to build our relationship with James’ tutor.

We just had a glance at the prices for the school uniform and, surprisingly, they’re somewhat lower than most of the local shops although that’s without counting the customary early summer discounting.

As far as official homework goes, we’ve several booklets to read through and need to enrol on parentmail as well over the summer. Unofficial homework includes increasing the amount of reading that James does and we’re hoping to work through the remainder of the maths workbook that we bought last year to make it an easier start for him.

Stenaline have been running £10 daytrips to Glasgow on Wednesdays for the last couple of months which would have been rather handy except that it didn’t run over any holiday periods so I guess the numbers would have been relatively low.

However, they’ve taken the plunge and extended it right through to the end of November. Still only on Wednesdays mind you but at least we’ll get a chance to go sometime over the summer without needing to take the kids out of school for it.

It’s a bit of a long day as daytrips generally are. The boat leaves Belfast at 07.30 and gets back at 21.45 which is a fairly long day as you need to get to the dock before 7am. However, the actual time in Glasgow is only from 12.00 to 16.45. That makes it a bit of a whirlwind trip if you want to see some of the sites so you’d need to be quite selective and have your time planned out before you go.

For our first quick look, we’re having a skim through the Greater Glasgow guide put out by the tourist office. The Lonely Planet chapter from their Scotland guide probably has more information but for four hours, you don’t need a whole lot of information.

Actually, it’s Open Farm Weekend here and it’s on a different day. That’s kind of confusing as it means that when you look up the open farm day website, you find that Northern Ireland doesn’t have any farms open which I’m sure must drop the numbers attending somewhat.

Seeing as it was a lovely sunny day, we set off for Gordonall Farm near Greyabbey. which was open to schools on the 13th of June and to everybody on the 14th. It’s quite a mixed farm with some livestock (sheep and cows), some biomass plantations, cereals and even a guy demonstrating some country crafts. You don’t really appreciate the size of the farm ’til you go on their tractor ride which seems to go on forever and certainly much further than any we’ve paid for.

Sunday was another lovely day so it was off to Armagh Apple Farm which was quite a different experience. The farm itself seemed somewhat smaller though it’s hard to judge the scale of a farm as you don’t know where one ends and another begins. In their shed they’d a whole range of apple based products. This time of year, the apples themselves are tiny and there are apple festivals on later in the year around the time of the apple harvest.

Worth going to for sure but I’m not so sure we’d have enjoyed the days if the weather had been poor as most things are obviously outside.