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Some people believe that children at secondary school should be streamed, i.e. taught in classes according to ability, rather than being taught in mixed-ability classes. Do you think the advantages of streaming children at secondary school outweigh the disadvantages?

Sep 29, 2022 / Expected task 2: 2022 / 2:42 am

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Some people believe that children at secondary school should be streamed, i.e. taught in classes according to ability, rather than being taught in mixed-ability classes. Do you think the advantages of streaming children at secondary school outweigh the disadvantages?

Give reasons for your answer and include relevant examples from your own knowledge and experience.
Write at least 250 words.

It is argued that classes of secondary school should be streamed based on the potentials of the students rather than selecting them randomly. I think this would have both positive and negative results.

Turning to the brighter side of this move, the performance level of the whole class can be upgraded. To be precise, it is easy for teachers to teach children of the same wavelength rather than with diverse intellectual abilities. This is crucial in the secondary school level since this is the period when these children are taught serious math, science and literature. For example, a math teacher can adopt a uniform strategy to teach a group of similar potentials, which makes her easy to deliver the class. She can plan well ahead regarding the following: the time required, the strategies of class and the assignments needed to make the class more productive.

Turning to the darker side of this move, it causes some psychological issues among children, which may affect their academics adversely. To be clearer, when children are classified in such a way, two worst issues which would stem from it are bullying and hostility. For instance, the class of superior talents tends to bully the class of inferior talents, and by contrast, the latter group would be envious towards the former, which eventually creates serious hostility towards them. In short, when the first group is most likely to benefit from this, the second group would feel desperate, which makes them under-performers and in rare cases, some may drop out.

To conclude, it is apparently difficult to decide whether streaming secondary school children based on their abilities or to select classes randomly irrespective of their potentials.