What happens when a teacher comes across a child or a group of children who are resistant to their teaching and make slow or little progress? They are ‘differentiated’ into a slow table and set differentiated tasks based on a set of ‘rule of thumb’ procedures. These might include exercises written in bigger letters and simpler language, task-setting with reduced conceptual content, a greater emphasis, in primary schools at least, on work which includes physical objects (beads, blocks, models of letters, learning games) and encouragement to use simpler thinking strategies such as trial and error and primitive comparisons. Quite often a classroom assistant, or special needs assistant, is directed to this group of children to give them ‘extra time’ – a further typical response.
There are no scientific grounds for these procedures and practices or any evidence that they work.
The committed teacher tries not to write these children off, but is under ideological and organisational pressures to do just that. Despite the temporary inference of the term ‘learning difficulties’, the failure of these children to make substantial progress, or indeed any progress, allows the more deep-seated conservative ideology of inherent ability or inability to reassert itself. ‘Not very bright’, ‘slow’, ‘low ability’, even ‘thick’ are terms that abound in every staffroom.
Organisationally, the primary teacher has to keep standards up and SAT scores high and is forced to make a choice between those who respond to teaching and those who don’t. The slow table is given ‘the best we can do’ treatment and drifts through the school years, ending in the first year of secondary school with lower than chronological age abilities in reading and maths. Once in the much more complex and fragmented environment of a secondary school, this group – by all statistical measure growing larger every year – ends their school careers with few or no qualifications.
Teachers become demoralised at their failure to teach such children and ‘inherited ability/lack of ability’ ideology is a better refuge than a sense of personal failure. But in fact their failure is not a personal issue – it is a professional one! They simply do not have the expertise or training to make a difference. When differentiating low-achieving children’s work, teachers believe they are making a strong professional intervention with these pupils, but this is a complete misconception. They are devising an untested and unscientific coping strategy for these children which, relative to other children in the class, will increase the distance from their peers in terms of learning ability, day by day, month by month and year by year.