The Sorting That Starts at Seven
Almost every seven-year-old in England has already been sorted onto a table, and by Year 7 most are in maths sets. The biggest study yet, out this spring, says the sorting isn't the disaster its critics feared - but nearly a third of children are in the wrong set, and the label has a habit of sticking.
Somewhere in your child's classroom there is a table with a name. Red table, or the Squirrels, or Group 3. The names are cheerful and the children are not fooled. Ask any seven-year-old which table is the clever one and they will tell you without hesitation.
By the time children in England are seven, almost all of them have been sorted. When researchers looked at thousands of seven-year-olds in the Millennium Cohort Study, they found that 97 per cent were grouped by ability in some form. About four in five were split into ability groups inside the classroom for most of the school day, and one in six had been placed in a whole-class stream. Hardly any of this is written down anywhere for parents to see.
The sorting carries on at secondary school. A survey of 375 secondary schools found that 60 per cent set maths by attainment in Year 7, rising to 88 per cent by Year 11. If you have a child at a state school in England, it is very likely they know exactly where they sit in the pecking order, in at least one subject, and have known for years.
We rarely talk about this at the school gate. Sets and tables feel like plumbing, just how school works. But the research on what the sorting does to children is more interesting, and more contested, than that suggests.
Then, this April, the picture got more complicated. A UCL team led by Becky Taylor and Jeremy Hodgen followed Year 7 and 8 maths pupils across 97 schools for two years. Sixty-nine of the schools used sets and 28 taught mixed-ability classes. It is the biggest direct comparison ever done in England.
The struggling pupils did about the same either way. So did children on free school meals. The children who did differently were the high attainers, who made about two months' less progress in mixed classes than in sets. Overall the mixed-ability schools came out a month behind. And in a finding that surprised the researchers, confidence in maths was actually lower in the mixed-ability schools, particularly among the lower attainers.
So the hope that mixed-ability teaching would lift the bottom didn't hold up, at least not in these schools. When the researchers sat in on lessons, they saw why. Mixed classes tended to move at the pace of the lower sets, with very little real differentiation. The quick children waited.
The primary school version is quieter but starts earlier. Tammy Campbell at UCL looked at what happened to seven-year-olds who were put in the bottom in-class maths group, or judged "below average" by their teacher. Even after taking their actual test scores into account, those children were far more likely to think of themselves as bad at maths at eleven. The group had become part of who they thought they were.
This matters because a group placement at seven is not a neutral measurement. Campbell's earlier work found that September-born children were nearly three times as likely as August-born children to be in the top stream, which is what you would expect if you line up a child of seven years and eleven months next to one who has only just turned seven. Teachers' judgements of ability also tracked family income, gender, ethnicity and whether English was spoken at home, over and above what the children could actually do.
The mistakes were not random. Black pupils were about two and a half times more likely than white pupils to be placed lower than their results warranted. Girls were one and a half times more likely than boys to be placed too low, and boys were more likely to be placed too high. The authors called it creeping prejudice, and recommended that schools sort on prior attainment alone, and on nothing else.
Put the two halves together and you get an odd picture. Setting, done properly, doesn't appear to hold back the children at the bottom, and it does help the ones at the top. But a lot of children are not where they should be, the placements shape how they see themselves, and a child in a bottom set spends years being told, in a way no adult ever quite says out loud, what kind of learner they are.
How was the set decided, and was it purely on test scores? How often do children move between sets, and how many actually did last year? Who teaches the bottom set? The EEF's own advice after the new study was that specialist maths teachers should not be reserved for the top sets, which tells you what often happens. And at primary, does the class know which table is which, and has anyone thought about what the youngest children in the year make of where they have been put?
None of this needs to be a row with the school. Most teachers are uneasy about the sorting too, and most did not design it. But a set is a snapshot of a particular child on a particular day, and it has a habit of turning into a verdict. The research suggests the difference between the two comes down to whether anyone keeps checking.
By the time children in England are seven, almost all of them have been sorted. When researchers looked at thousands of seven-year-olds in the Millennium Cohort Study, they found that 97 per cent were grouped by ability in some form. About four in five were split into ability groups inside the classroom for most of the school day, and one in six had been placed in a whole-class stream. Hardly any of this is written down anywhere for parents to see.
The sorting carries on at secondary school. A survey of 375 secondary schools found that 60 per cent set maths by attainment in Year 7, rising to 88 per cent by Year 11. If you have a child at a state school in England, it is very likely they know exactly where they sit in the pecking order, in at least one subject, and have known for years.
We rarely talk about this at the school gate. Sets and tables feel like plumbing, just how school works. But the research on what the sorting does to children is more interesting, and more contested, than that suggests.
The old answer and the new one
For a long time the evidence pointed one way. The Education Endowment Foundation, which reviews research for English schools, pooled 58 studies on setting and streaming. On average the effect on progress was nothing at all. Underneath the average, though, was a pattern: a small gain for high attainers and a bigger loss for low attainers, roughly three months of progress behind their peers in mixed classes. The EEF's verdict was that setting was not a good way to help children who were already struggling, who are also the children most likely to end up in the bottom group.Then, this April, the picture got more complicated. A UCL team led by Becky Taylor and Jeremy Hodgen followed Year 7 and 8 maths pupils across 97 schools for two years. Sixty-nine of the schools used sets and 28 taught mixed-ability classes. It is the biggest direct comparison ever done in England.
The struggling pupils did about the same either way. So did children on free school meals. The children who did differently were the high attainers, who made about two months' less progress in mixed classes than in sets. Overall the mixed-ability schools came out a month behind. And in a finding that surprised the researchers, confidence in maths was actually lower in the mixed-ability schools, particularly among the lower attainers.
So the hope that mixed-ability teaching would lift the bottom didn't hold up, at least not in these schools. When the researchers sat in on lessons, they saw why. Mixed classes tended to move at the pace of the lower sets, with very little real differentiation. The quick children waited.
The label that follows you
None of that means the sets themselves are harmless. The same UCL group had already surveyed more than 11,000 Year 7 pupils about how they saw themselves. Children in top sets were the most confident, middle sets less so, bottom sets least of all, and the effect went beyond the subject they had been set for. Being in a low maths set dented children's confidence in general. When the team followed the pupils over time, the confidence gap between top and bottom sets widened. They called it a snowball effect. One child in a focus group put it more plainly: "Sets ruin your self-esteem."The primary school version is quieter but starts earlier. Tammy Campbell at UCL looked at what happened to seven-year-olds who were put in the bottom in-class maths group, or judged "below average" by their teacher. Even after taking their actual test scores into account, those children were far more likely to think of themselves as bad at maths at eleven. The group had become part of who they thought they were.
This matters because a group placement at seven is not a neutral measurement. Campbell's earlier work found that September-born children were nearly three times as likely as August-born children to be in the top stream, which is what you would expect if you line up a child of seven years and eleven months next to one who has only just turned seven. Teachers' judgements of ability also tracked family income, gender, ethnicity and whether English was spoken at home, over and above what the children could actually do.
A third of children in the wrong set
Here is the finding we keep coming back to. In 2019 the UCL team checked the Year 7 maths sets in 46 secondary schools against pupils' Key Stage 2 results. Thirty-one per cent of children were in a different set from the one their results predicted. Nearly a third.The mistakes were not random. Black pupils were about two and a half times more likely than white pupils to be placed lower than their results warranted. Girls were one and a half times more likely than boys to be placed too low, and boys were more likely to be placed too high. The authors called it creeping prejudice, and recommended that schools sort on prior attainment alone, and on nothing else.
Put the two halves together and you get an odd picture. Setting, done properly, doesn't appear to hold back the children at the bottom, and it does help the ones at the top. But a lot of children are not where they should be, the placements shape how they see themselves, and a child in a bottom set spends years being told, in a way no adult ever quite says out loud, what kind of learner they are.
What to ask
The sets-versus-mixed argument has been running for fifty years and this spring's study will not end it. For a parent, though, it may be the wrong argument. The more useful questions are about how the sorting is done and how fixed it is.How was the set decided, and was it purely on test scores? How often do children move between sets, and how many actually did last year? Who teaches the bottom set? The EEF's own advice after the new study was that specialist maths teachers should not be reserved for the top sets, which tells you what often happens. And at primary, does the class know which table is which, and has anyone thought about what the youngest children in the year make of where they have been put?
None of this needs to be a row with the school. Most teachers are uneasy about the sorting too, and most did not design it. But a set is a snapshot of a particular child on a particular day, and it has a habit of turning into a verdict. The research suggests the difference between the two comes down to whether anyone keeps checking.
Sources & Further Reading