Primary schools: to band or not to band?

Academic Colin Calleja says Evarist Bartolo’s proposal for banding has simply shown how policy-makers are panicking and reading the current state of Malta’s education system – since 2011 having abandoned state secondary school streaming and now pooling all students in a mixed-ability college system – wrongly.

“The teachers are asking for help. Teachers are not asking for top-down circulars dictating what one has to do in each and every school, but for support of their efforts to serve their students,” Calleja says.

A circular recently issued to all heads of state primary schools called for the grouping of grade 5 and 6 pupils on the criterion of overall level of achievement in their annual Maltese, English and maths annual exams. The sudden side-step goes against the already professed policy of inclusion and differentiated teaching which is supposed to take these students into mixed ability secondary schools.

“While I don’t doubt the good intentions of the promoters, I am truly worried that, as much of the research indicates, the practice of grouping children by ability leads to more inequality, with those in the lower bands being the most affected,” Calleja says.

And with the reality of each school being different, he fears that the nationwide solution of banding will miss the real needs of particular communities in Malta.

Education Minister Evarist Barolo insists banding and streaming are two different things and that the government has no intention of going back to streaming. Instead, he wants banding to give lower achievers in the primary school the necessary backing to join the mixed ability secondary stream, and at the same time, giving secondary school teachers some reprieve to allow them to teach better.

Calleja says both banding or streaming are systems of selection, grouping kids according to their performance or perceived ability. But while streaming splits students into several groups based on a narrower ability grouping, banding puts pupils into broader ability bands – proponents say banding, unlike streaming, helps ensure a balance of different ability levels in each class.

Teachers teaching the lower streams tend to have lower expectations for their students with the consequence that students in these classes tend to have a diluted academic curriculum

“Banding, like streaming, manipulates results in the core subjects, in this case Maltese, English and maths, to allocate pupils into different streams with the hope of facilitating instruction to meet individual needs more effectively.”

Calleja says local and international research shows all selective systems “tend to stigmatise and perpetuate the disadvantage of students already the most disadvantaged”, affecting especially the poor, minority students and for those with limited language proficiency. A 2010 study by Delma Byrne and Erner Smyth highlights the slow progress in achievement of the ‘banded’ students because of “uninteresting lessons… or teachers’ low expectations and standards for their students’ performance.”

The result is that students hailing from the streaming experience being more disruptive, having a poor interaction with peers, disengaged from school and increased bullying: “leaving a profound and lasting negative influence on school attachment often prompting early school leaving.”

But then again: doesn’t streaming benefit high achievers?

Even here research shows that streaming does not necessarily assist students in the high-ability groups. American studies suggest this has had a negative impact on “academic self-concept” – how students perceive themselves – of boys studying mathematics in the higher-streamed classes.

Calleja says streaming can also see the more experienced and better-prepared teachers get automatically assigned to these higher sets, where they cover more challenging material at a faster pace.  “On the other hand, teachers teaching the lower streams tend to have lower expectations for their students with the consequence that students in these classes tend to have a diluted academic curriculum,” Calleja says.

Banding’s apologists will argue that this only happens in extreme streaming: banding after all still allows mixed ability groups, requiring teachers to differentiate instruction. But Calleja says that notwithstanding the good intentions of policy makers, the arguments against streaming still holds for banding.

“Reading some of the online blogs and comments in the social media, one could easily see the apartheid language being used by many of those who are in favour of banding and streaming. This language will dominate educational discourse with all the dangers that go with it, namely the intensification of the labeling effect and a rise in numbers of school dropouts and lower levels of achievement.”

But even the Malta Union of Teachers says its survey shows the vast majority of teachers are against mixed ability classes. How can the government ignore this widespread sentiment among teachers who are the ones who have to make mixed ability classes work?

Teachers are tired of being ordered what to do from the top, maybe myself included, without offering real, hands-on, in-the-field support to help them handle some challenging situations that arise in the lived experience of the teacher.

“I don’t believe that teachers in their majority are against mixed-ability teaching but they are against situations in which they cannot teach… teacher are foot-soldiers who seek the best interest of the students under their care… and they need all our support and admiration,” Calleja says, who in his dealings with teachers notes that they are constantly craving support.

“They’re tired of being ordered what to do from the top, maybe myself included, without offering real, hands-on, in-the-field support to help them handle some challenging situations that arise in the lived experience of the teacher.”

But Calleja also says teachers should be as against banding as much as they claim to be against mixed ability – both concepts imposed on them. “It is not a matter of ignoring the plight of teachers but it is a matter of finding solutions that work within a value system that, as country, we have opted to develop, namely the values of inclusion and access to learning for all.”

Calleja says that had mixed-ability been introduced with the right support system, “today we wouldn’t be talking about banding and going back to the grouping and selection of students by ability.”

Indeed, government claims that teachers were not prepared for mixed-ability.

“I agree that one is never prepared enough,” Calleja interjects. “But to state that teachers are not prepared to teach mixed-ability classes, I believe, one would not be respecting the professional preparation that teachers had in their years of formation and the years that followed.”