Students (or indeed people generally) learn best by being directly taught by an expert teacher, not from interaction with their peers particularly, if those peers are at radically different ability levels.

Mixed ability teaching isn’t “hard” it is impossible. Most books on how do it describe groupwork, discussion, separate activities, everything but actual teaching. It is impossible to stand in front of a class and simultaneously explain 5 different things.

And please don’t tell me that setting encourages bullying and division. There is nothing worse for causing humiliation than putting in kids who can barely write their names in with high achievers. The most able often feel embarrassed to achieve, the least able feel humiliated by being unable to keep up.

And finally, I’m no advocate of selection but we are in a disasterous situation if it becomes a “boo-word” that can be blindly applied to anything as a criticism. I would sooner have selection than universal mixed ability teaching, even if it meant I ended up teaching the rejected in a secondary modern. Mixed ability grouping is about dragging down high achievers while simultaneously demotivating the weakest. it is usually done because the time-tablers don’t have the brains to group people any other way and because it helps bad teachers off the hook of having to advance all their classes rather than just the median child.

I think ability setting is an evil to be avoided where possible (and I know this is where our greatest difference lies). I also concede it is an evil that is not always possible to avoid, and your subject may be one such place. But I don’t think it should ever be aspired to.

It is not controversial educational theory to suggest that high-flying students achieve deep learning from teaching a subject (or, rather, explaining it to others) - nor is it especially controversial to suggest that all students learn better from their peers than they do from you or me (the problem is usually WHAT they are learning!) Therefore it is only slightly controversial to combine the two and say - where possible - mixed ability teaching, properly managed, offers the best chance to encourage the learning of the least able and stretch the most able. It can be problematic in some subjects when the distance is too vast (and that, I assume is why some setting is inevitable in the likes of Maths) but the problem is usually not the mixture of abilities, but the behaviour issue. But of course, taking the high-flyers out leaves those students who wish to work but struggle with those who aren’t fussed, further disadvantaging the former.

Mixed ability teaching is very hard, and I’m by no means claiming to be great at it (indeed I’ve had students complain - normally too late for me to do anything about it - that I’ve pitched things too high for them, etc.) But it is better. Setting labels students, encourages bullying, division, bad behaviour (yes, it encourages bad behaviour) and is effectively selection under one roof - though it is better, in that regard, than streaming across the board.

I advocated setting by ability in most subjects. I even said it should replace teaching students in age groups. However, for timetabling purposes it might be necessary to identify a top stream for Latin and Greek.

b) are you serious about the religion thing? After all, that means most people won’t have any religious education at all, nor know anything about what anybody else believes. I can’t think of any rationale for that.

c) You talked about a top stream (or something like that). Would you really stream by ability across the board?

(I’m trying to decide which post to have my go about mixed ability teaching on… still not decided!)

Making it palatable in a world that generally distrusts learning, however, would be hard.

Regarding RE: it should definitely be taught, but not without including atheism as another perspective on religion. Also RE should be cross-cultural and take on a view of the whole world and throughout history to be valuable.

It was news to me that we aimed to teach about the institutions rather than the parts of life that the institutions relate to. RE isn’t specifically teaching about organised religion anymore than French lessons are about the Oxford French/English Dictionary, Economics lessons are about the Bank of England or Science lessons are about the Royal Society.

I am not misusing “taboo”. If we pretend that religion is irrelevant when it is clearly one of the greatest forces in history and in the world today we clearly are suppressing the truth for our own comfort. Something a culture specifically avoids mentioning or acknowledging is a taboo no matter how you dress it up.

You seem very willing to compare religion with the important things we don’t explicitly teach. How about looking at things we do teach? Are quadratic equations, the book “Hard Times” and the details of motte and bailey castles really more important to our lives than the religions in our culture?

And you are still (deliberately, I assume) misusing the word ‘taboo’. Nobody is trying to ban or silence anything or anyone.

Actually we do have units about the media as a part of PSHE, and there’s also bits of English that seem to be about television. That’s without the optional subject of media studies.

And with regard to taboo, then it certainly seems like a taboo if we are willing to learn the history and geography of many different peoples (not to mention the languages and literature of a select few) but not about their religions. To strike out important information about our culture and other cultures certainly strikes me as enforcing a taboo. It also strikes me as dangerous at a time when ignorance and prejudice is so widespread.