The Church is currently investing €3 million to fund training programmes for teachers dealing with mixed ability classes in Church schools but in the midst of all this effort, the government has announced that it would introduce banding in State schools, another form of streaming which groups students depending on their abilities.

The EU funds, which were applied for by the secretariat for Catholic Education Archdiocese of Malta, were specifically allocated towards the ‘Training Educators for Diversity’ (TED) project.

In a nutshell, the training programme enables educators to maintain, and improve, present educational outcomes in the face of increased diversity and technological changes in the classroom, “in support of national educational reforms”. Its aim is to identify, promote, design and develop effective teaching strategies for individualised learning while also providing a comprehensive suite of skills, techniques and complimentary management tools for the implementation of inclusive strategies.

The introduction of the banding (streaming) concept in State schools clearly means that the Church, State and independent schools will have separate policies when it comes to teaching children with different abilities.

Questions are being raised over the different concepts being used in schools - mixed ability teaching in Church and independent schools, and banding in State schools. A change in schools may affect children who find themselves moving to different systems of teaching, complicating their shift from one system to another.

Concepts in schools have changed over the years, from streaming, to setting to mixed abilities, and now banding, which does not differ much from streaming and is in fact being labeled as such by the Nationalist Opposition.

A group of 27 lecturers recently teamed up to express their concern over the new banding concept for State schools.

In an open letter sent to Education Minister Evarist Bartolo, the lecturers quoted a UK survey which states that ‘banding is a less differentiated form of streaming’. They said that many experts consider banding on the basis of standardised tests as an imperfect method which cannot be carried out at school lever where numbers are too small for it.

However the minister, in comments to the media, did point out that banding will be introduced in the bigger-sized schools.

The lecturers argued that banding manipulates results to allocate pupils to classes on the basis of some criteria, not transparently revealed in the circular issued by the government to educators, unless gender is one of them.

The most of worrying aspects to the lecturers are the selective system, where the younger born children will not have the opportunity to benefit from peer learning with slightly older peers – which will therefore more likely to be engineered into the lower bands or streams in Years 5 and 6 – a negative effect which has been studied both locally and internationally.

On this aspect, when the news that banding would be introduced in schools emerged, the Equal Partners’ Foundation vice-president and consultant psychologist Elena Tanti Burlo had told this newspaper that children up to age six are put in the same class in the UK, meaning a mixture of ages in the same class.

Citing an example, she said that if a pupil could not talk very well at age three, and is in the same class as a child aged four who has developed a language, the three-year-old can pick that up from his four-year-old class mate.

Another aspect is to do with banding/streaming itself. The lecturers said that it is because of repeated reliable studies about the negative effects of banding/streaming on individuals and on national achievement that barely three years ago, as part of a costly and wider reform, referring to the National Curriculum Framework, abolished streaming in primary schools.

Ofsted: mixed-ability classes ‘a curse’ on bright pupils

But one cannot ignore what the head of Ofsted (the official body for inspecting schools in the UK), Sir Michael Wilshaw, had said back in 2012, as was quoted by The Guardian, that bright schoolchildren are being failed by the “curse” of mixed-ability classes because teachers are tailoring lessons towards average and low-skilled pupils, according to the head of Ofsted.

In a powerful warning to head teachers, he said that schools in England should be more concerned with “good educational practice” than “social engineering”.

In the case of Malta, the teachers’ union (MUT) has said it agreed with the introduction of banding in schools since mixed ability classes present massive challenges to teachers.