Andy Hall wrote:
On 2008-07-25 00:32:21 +0100, "John" said:

Those who can, work, those that can't teach! My children are now in
private
education, not just because of that episode by the way ;-)


FWIW, I've seen the same scenario, except that with mine the state
school had created classes covering two age years and was using the
more able and older children to effectively provide teaching assistance
for the younger and less able ones and deliberately holding them back.

Yep same happened with ours. It meant that the kids did pretty well in
the class during the first year - arguably better than if they'd all
been a single-year age group - but they just coasted during the second year.

The reason for it happening, at least in our case, was the fact that the
school was growing overall, but not at a rate which would, on
financial grounds, justify changing the number of classes per year from
2 to 3; therefore they implemented the split-year system effectively
making it 2.5 classes per year. Not that I'm defending the practice,
but you can see how it happened.

David