Setting and Streaming in Education: Sociology

Table of Contents

Last Updated on October 22, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Setting and streaming are ways of grouping pupils by ability. The pupils judged most able are placed in the top sets or streams, and those judged least able in the bottom ones.

Supporters argue that grouping by ability lets more able pupils be taught faster and pushed harder, while less able pupils are taught at a suitable pace and given the extra support they need.

However, interactionist researchers have criticised this way of organising teaching and learning. They have found that pupils tend to be placed in sets and streams partly on the basis of teacher stereotypes rather than their actual ability – so, for example, middle-class pupils are more likely to end up in the higher sets.

This topic is very closely related to the labelling theory of education: it is often teachers’ labels that decide which ability group a pupil is put into. On the AQA specification it comes under “the organisation of teaching and learning”, part of ‘relationships and processes within schools’ on Paper 1 (7192/1).

Setting and streaming mind map for A-level sociology.

Setting and Streaming: Definitions

Streaming is where pupils are grouped by ability for all or most of their subjects. A pupil in the top stream will be in the top group for every subject, with the top stream being the most academic and the bottom the least.
Setting is where pupils are grouped by ability for particular subjects, so a pupil may be in the top set for maths and the second set for English, and so on.

A related concept is banding, which is effectively the same as streaming but with broader groups: a year group is split into a small number of bands, and each band may contain several classes.

The opposite of setting and streaming is mixed-ability teaching, where pupils of different abilities are all taught together in the same class.

The consequences of setting and streaming

Setting and streaming have a long history in the British education system, and grouping by ability carried on after comprehensive schools were introduced. It is still widely used today, especially setting in maths.

Those in favour of teaching in ability groups claim that it allows pupils to be taught at a level and pace appropriate to their abilities, so teachers can push the more academic pupils in the top sets while giving appropriate support to those in the lower sets.

However, there is also research evidence that setting and streaming:

deny equality of opportunity to those in the lower sets, who may not be entered for higher-level exams as a result

place pupils partly on the basis of teacher stereotypes rather than ability – working-class pupils, and Black pupils in particular, are more likely to end up in lower sets
can produce anti-school attitudes in pupils placed in lower sets
thus help to reproduce social class, gender and ethnic inequalities in educational achievement

may reduce school cohesion and togetherness.

The studies below show these problems in practice.

Social class and banding: Ball’s Beachside Comprehensive

Stephen Ball (1981) conducted a classic study of banding at a school he called Beachside Comprehensive. Pupils were placed into one of three ability bands when they first arrived, based on information provided by their primary schools.

While the bands were supposedly based on ability, Ball found that other factors, such as social class background, affected which band pupils were placed in. Among pupils of similar measured ability, those whose fathers had non-manual (middle-class) jobs were more likely to be placed in the top band.

When pupils first entered the school they were mostly conformist and eager to learn, but over time differences in attitudes to learning and behaviour emerged depending on which band they had been put in.

Teachers expected those in band one, the most academic group, to do well, and these pupils kept their enthusiastic pro-school attitude. Band two was where teachers expected behaviour problems, and pupils in this band were the most likely to develop anti-school attitudes – putting less effort into homework, messing around in class and being absent more often.

The conclusion of this study is that teachers’ judgements were influenced by pupils’ class background, so working-class pupils were more likely to be placed in lower bands and to achieve lower grades, and vice versa for middle-class pupils. Banding thus helped to reproduce social class inequalities in educational achievement. Ball’s findings on how pupils responded to their bands link closely to Lacey’s idea of polarisation – see pupil subcultures.

Setting and streaming in primary schools

Some of the earliest research on ability grouping was carried out in primary schools. Joan Barker Lunn’s (1970) study for the National Foundation for Educational Research compared streamed and non-streamed junior schools. It found that streaming had negative personal and social consequences for pupils in the lower streams, limited their attainment and aspirations, and that there was little movement between streams once pupils had been placed.

Hallam, Ireson and Davies (2004) explored primary pupils’ own experiences of ability grouping. They interviewed six pupils of high, moderate and low ability in each Key Stage 2 class in six primary schools, which used different combinations of streaming, setting, grouping within classes and mixed-ability teaching.

They found that pupils understood how and why they were grouped and generally accepted the reasons given. Grouping didn’t change pupils’ overall attitudes to school, but it did affect their awareness of where they stood in the class ‘pecking order’ and the teasing that went on – although a school’s ethos could make a difference to how much.

Setting and GCSE tiers

Many GCSE subjects are taught and examined in tiers. Pupils entered for the higher tier can achieve grades 9 to 4, but pupils entered for the foundation tier can only achieve grades 5 to 1, however well they do on the day. In practice, pupils in lower sets are more likely to be entered for the foundation tier.

Gillborn and Youdell’s (2000) study of two secondary schools found that teachers’ judgements about ‘ability’ – and the pressure to raise the school’s league table results – led to Black pupils being placed disproportionately in lower groups and lower tiers. Their study, and the idea of ‘educational triage’, is covered in full in Gillborn and Youdell: Rationing Education.

Recent evidence on setting and streaming

The Education Endowment Foundation

The Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit reviews the evidence on setting and streaming and concludes that, on average, it has no impact on pupils’ progress. HOWEVER, this average hides a split: setting or streaming has a small negative impact on lower-attaining pupils and a small positive impact on higher-attaining pupils.

The EEF also notes that disadvantaged pupils are more likely to be placed in lower sets by mistake, that lower sets are more often taught by less experienced teachers, and that lower expectations can become self-fulfilling. The evidence base is described as very limited, however, so these conclusions are cautious.

Misallocation to maths sets

Research by Connolly and colleagues (2019), part of a large UCL-led project on grouping, looked at 9,301 Year 7 pupils in 46 secondary schools in England that set pupils for maths. They compared the set each pupil was actually placed in with the set their Key Stage 2 maths score would suggest.

They found that nearly a third of pupils (31.2%) were misallocated – about half placed higher than their score suggested and half lower. Black pupils’ odds of being placed in a lower set than their score warranted were 2.43 times those of White pupils, and girls’ odds were about 1.5 times those of boys. The researchers found insufficient evidence that pupils’ social class affected misallocation once other factors were taken into account.

This is strong, large-scale evidence that set placement isn’t simply based on ability – which supports what Ball and Gillborn and Youdell found in much smaller qualitative studies.

Advantages of mixed-ability teaching

Given all of the above, you might want to consider whether mixed-ability teaching is best. It does seem to have several advantages over teaching in ability groups:

There will probably be a broader social and cultural mix of pupils in each class (especially if teachers would otherwise group pupils according to class and ethnic stereotypes), which may help foster social cohesion.
It gives lower-ability pupils more contact with higher-ability pupils, which could help them progress faster.

It recognises that ability isn’t fixed and that pupils can ‘spurt’ at any time, rather than being stuck in the wrong set for a year or more.
Teachers can still differentiate by ability within a mixed-ability class by setting ‘stretch and challenge’ activities.

HOWEVER, supporters of setting argue that mixed-ability classes are harder to teach well, and the EEF evidence suggests higher attainers may gain slightly from being set – so the debate is about who benefits, not just whether setting ‘works’.

How setting and streaming come up in the exam

Setting and streaming come up on Paper 1 (7192/1), as evidence for in-school explanations of class, gender and ethnic differences in achievement, and occasionally as a short-answer question in their own right. For example:

June 2019, 4 marks: Outline two criticisms of schools selecting pupils by ability.
June 2022, 10 marks: Applying material from Item A, analyse two ways in which relationships and processes within schools may lead to anti-school subcultures. Setting and polarisation is one of the strongest routes into this question – see my worked answer.

Revision bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision bundle, written by Karl Thompson, who taught A-level sociology for eighteen years and spent twelve as an AQA examiner, marking all three papers on the current specification.

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the education topic, a compulsory part of the first year of AQA A-level sociology.

Sources

Ball, S. (1981) Beachside Comprehensive: A Case-Study of Secondary Schooling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barker Lunn, J. C. (1970) Streaming in the Primary School. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research.
Connolly, P., Taylor, B., Francis, B., Archer, L., Hodgen, J., Mazenod, A. and Tereshchenko, A. (2019) ‘The misallocation of students to academic sets in maths: a study of secondary schools in England’, British Educational Research Journal, 45(4).

Education Endowment Foundation, Teaching and Learning Toolkit: Setting or streaming.
Gillborn, D. and Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing Education: Policy, Practice, Reform and Equity.
Hallam, S. (2012) ‘Streaming and setting in UK primary schools: evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study’, FORUM, 54(1), 57–63.

Hallam, S., Ireson, J. and Davies, J. (2004) ‘Primary pupils’ experiences of different types of grouping in school’, British Educational Research Journal, 30(4), 515–533.
Pearson Edexcel, 9–1 awarding FAQs (tiered grades).