Raising schooling attainments by grouping pupils within each class

With a view to raising the attainments of pupils at the early stages of their schooling, detailed recommendations (‘strategies’) for teaching numeracy and literacy have been issued by the Department of Education and Employment. Among the important recommendations (clearly stated in the Preliminary Report of the National Numeracy Task Force) are that, in the central and greater part of each lesson, the children in a class are to be divided into a number of sub-groups according to their ability. Some reliance for the success of this recommendation has been placed in official circles on a Canadian research study (a ‘meta-analysis’) summarising a great many earlier studies; the present article argues that the Canadian study was seriously flawed, that in reality such grouping of children within a class is often likely to be to the detriment especially of low-attainers (for example, summer-born boys), to lead to an increased disparity of attainments within the class, to a more difficult task for the teacher, and to a lower rate of progress by the class as a whole.