Sense and Setting

Finally, someone has shown a willingness to listen to those that matter most in the debate over whether or not setting has a place in Scottish education - the young people themselves! The front page of this week's Times Educational Supplement Scotland carries the story of the study conducted by Chris Smith and Margaret Sutherland of Glasgow University - a study that puts paid to any notion that the kids themselves see any merit in the concept. Thank you both! Setting, I have always felt, is ultimately destructive (which made life difficult for me when I worked in a school that practised it religiously). It brings few if any genuine benefits to the young people being manipulated in this particularly insensitive and ill-advised way - any benefits that the afficionados might dream up (usually as a rationalisation rather than a geuine rationale for the concept of setting) are much more than offset by the downside. Setting, in my view, gained ground because of three main sets of attitudes: 1. there have always been those in Scottish education who have played the comprehensive, egalitarian, mixed-ability game on the surface, but who deep down would love to return to the deep dark days of streaming - setting is just streaming by another name; 2. the 'bandwagon' effect - there are always people in education who are willing to jump onto any bandwagon that happens along because they have neither the intelligence nor the self-confidence to work out for themselves the merits or otherwise of any such bandwagon; 3. too many in our schools are simply indifferent to the real needs of children - an indifference matched by a willingness to subordinate those real needs to the administrative convenience of concepts such as setting means that such ideas can hold sway and become common practice in many of our schools Let's listen to our young people and start to get rid of this iniquitous practice in our schools from today.

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.