Selective schools

A leading academic says NSW's selective school system is harming both low and high-achieving students, as a new study finds that grouping pupils by "ability" can be especially detrimental to those at the bottom.

"From a social and cognitive point of view, students generally do better if they have a range of abilities and social groups that they're mixing with for their schooling," said Chris Davison, head of UNSW's school of education and deputy director of the Gonski Institute for Education.

"One could argue that some of the reason the top 20 per cent is not performing as well as it used to in international assessments is that they're not being stretched.

"They're going into an environment where there are too many people just like them and they think that's normal. You need a flexible system so you're not branded as a star forever and told that you're a high achiever so you stop pushing yourself and get complacent, and you're not branded as a struggler and told you're never going to do well."

Grouping students by ability can also affect teaching practices, with a study of 600 teachers across 82 UK high schools published in the Cambridge Journal of Education on Friday finding that 74 per cent of the teachers said that "they expect high-attaining students to cover topics in more depth" and 60 per cent said "they do more repetition and rehearsal with low-attaining students".

Teachers also said they thought lower-achieving students were less able to learn independently without monitoring and support.

"'As [one teacher's] earlier quote suggests, 'if you get put into a [lower ability] class, you get treated like a [lower ability] pupil', and this then creates a cycle of restricted opportunity," the study's authors found.

"Students in some lower attainment attainment groups may be unintentionally directed towards a 'learned helplessness' that can hold back their active participation and engagement in learning over their school career and beyond."

They're going into an environment where there are too many people just like them and they think that's normal

Professor Davison said students put in lower-achievement groups tend to display similar negative behaviours, as she observed in Hong Kong, where all students are put into band 1, 2 or 3 schools based on their performance in tests at the end of primary school.

"Because streaming is so habitual, in each of those schools they have a top class and a remedial class and the remedial kids in the band 3 [highest-achieving] schools ended up behaving in all the ways you would expect of the bottom-achieving kids," Professor Davison said.

"They used to muck up, show disobedience, they gave up and lost engagement even in that kind of high-achieving environment because their norms were all perverted and they were comparing themselves to the top kids."

Professor Davison said this effect can also be seen among lower-achieving students in NSW selective schools.

"Even if you have children in a selective school, what happens is the kids who don't do as well academically, who have the underlying IQ but don't have things like resilience, motivation or maturity, those kids will tend to feel and do worse in that kind of environment than they would in a mixed-ability group," she said.

"It's clear that mixing students at a common level in particular subject areas is helpful for learning, but schools which have the greatest flexibility and ability to group students in different ways have the best outcomes."