Banding and Setting

It is evident that banding and setting practices, while overcoming some of the worst aspects of streaming in relation to differential educational achievement, bring with them their own set of practices and problems.

Nell Keddie's study ("Classroom Knowledge", 1971), for example, illustrated the way classroom interaction affects both the self-perception and performance of children. In the school she studied, a humanities course was introduced, to be taught to all pupils of a particular age group. Although the school streamed pupils on the basis of educational ability, this particular course was designed to be taught to pupils of all abilities, in mixed-ability classes. Thus, although the school itself was streamed, no streaming by ability took-place on this particular course.

What Keddie found was that teachers brought to the classroom a range of personal, social and work-related experiences that informed their perceptions of a child's ability. Thus, the fact that a pupil had attracted the label as an "A stream" or a "C stream" pupil informed teacher expectations of the respective abilities of each type of student. In addition, the way different pupils behaved in the classroom further served to confirm teacher expectations and behaviour.

What this suggests, therefore, is that banding and setting simply displace the "streaming effect"; that is, instead of it being an "all or nothing" effect (those streamed as able and bright performing best, for example, across the curriculum), these practices produce a more-contained, subject-based, set of individual performances. In addition, it is also important to note that it is rarely the case, in reality, that a child displays a wide range of differing banded abilities (that is, they appear in a range of different subject-based band positions - the top band for some subjects and a lower band for others). Where this does occur there is evidence of s self-fulfilling prophecy once again, whereby academic performance rises and falls according to the band or set.

In addition - and somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, given our everyday, taken-for-granted, assumptions about "high ability" students - Keddie also observed that:

"There is between teachers and "A pupils" a reciprocity [mutual exchange] of perspective which allows teachers to define, unchallenged by "A pupils", as they may be challenged by "C pupils", the nature and boundaries of what is to count as knowledge. It would seem to be the failure of high- ability pupils to question what they are taught in schools that contributes in large measure to their educational achievement.".

This idea, if valid, is extremely important since it suggests that one important characteristic of high-achieving pupils is their ability to key-into and conform to their teacher's academic and behavioural expectations (technically called "consanguinuity"). This suggests, in part, that pupils who appear in the top bands and sets do so because they have learnt "how to play the education game" by understanding and accepting (however grudgingly) the rules laid down by teachers, schools, governments and the like.