Ralph Allen School has been highlighted in a new case study by Supporting Education Group, following a visit from James Marsh, who spent time speaking with staff including the Head and exploring the school’s approach to mixed ability teaching.
His article, titled What happens when a school decides that disadvantage is everyone’s problem, examines how the Bath school has reshaped its approach to learning to better support all pupils.
Seb Witts, Interim Headteacher at Ralph Allen School, said, “At Ralph Allen School, we have always believed that the choices we make about how we organise learning say something profound about what we believe children are capable of. Over the past few years, we have made some significant decisions — decisions that have not always been straightforward, but that we believe are right for our pupils, our staff, and our community.
“It is genuinely heartening to see interest in the work we are doing here. Education can sometimes feel like a solitary endeavour, with each school quietly getting on with its own challenges.
“When the things we are trying resonate with others — when they prompt questions, conversations or reflection – that feels meaningful. Every school is different, every community is different. But we are very glad to share with visitors what we have learned, and how we achieved a great experience for our students that has been recognised by the Sunday Times as the top comprehensive school in the southwest.”
What happens when a school decides that disadvantage is everyone’s problem?
Most high-performing schools are proud of their results. Fewer ask a harder question: whose results, exactly?
At Ralph Allen School in Bath, leadership did something that takes real courage in today’s accountability climate. They looked beneath their strong headline figures and didn’t like everything they found.
The pattern was familiar. High prior attainment pupils were thriving. Middle and lower prior attainment pupils were plateauing. And disadvantaged learners were disproportionately concentrated in underperformance. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing that would trigger an Ofsted concern. Just a quiet, structural inequality, hidden in plain sight.
Their response wasn’t a new intervention programme or a tweak to their timetable. It was something far more fundamental.
They removed setting altogether.
Why setting? Why now?
This wasn’t a decision made on instinct. The evidence base has been building for years.
Research consistently shows that pupils in lower sets make slower progress, around one to two months less per year, and carry the weight of reduced confidence alongside it. Disadvantaged pupils are more likely to be misallocated to those lower sets in the first place (Connolly et al., 2019). And far from closing the gap, attainment grouping can actively widen it (Tereshchenko, 2019).
The core problem isn’t really about organisation at all. It’s about expectation. Setting, at its worst, institutionalises lower expectations for the very pupils who can least afford them.
What actually changed?
Removing setting isn’t a structural tweak. It’s a cultural and pedagogical shift that touches everything.
Ralph Allen moved to mixed prior attainment classes across the school, anchored by a principle that’s simple to say and genuinely hard to live: essential for some, harmful for none.
In practice, that meant teaching to the top: starting with high challenge and using scaffolding to bring everyone in, rather than pitching to the middle and hoping the rest follow. It meant designing classrooms where peer learning is a genuine lever, not an afterthought.
Higher attaining pupils deepen their understanding by explaining it. Others access models of thinking and language they wouldn’t encounter in a lower set. Behaviour, too, shifted, because when you stop concentrating challenge in one room, you stop concentrating the conditions that make teaching in that room so hard.
None of this was easy. Early implementation would have benefited from more staff consultation. CPD needed to be intensive and sustained, focused on adaptive teaching, scaffolding and curriculum design for mixed attainment. Middle leaders needed time, backing and consistency from above. These aren’t small asks.
What the numbers show – and what they don’t
The outcomes are striking. Progress 8 scores for middle prior attainment pupils in science, for instance, moved from +0.33 to +0.88 to +0.90. For lower prior attainment pupils, the trajectory went from –0.6 to –0.2 to +0.1.
There was an early dip in some high-attainment outcomes – notably triple science – but it recovered as cohorts moved through the system.
The numbers matter. But they don’t capture everything.
What they can’t easily measure is the shift in ownership. In a setted system, disadvantage tends to get contained – managed by specific teachers, addressed through specific interventions, located in specific rooms. In a mixed attainment system, disadvantage becomes visible in every classroom. And that means responsibility for it becomes shared by everyone.
That’s the real transformation.
What this means beyond one school
Ralph Allen’s experience points to something bigger than a single structural decision.
Inclusion cannot live in SEND provision alone. It has to be embedded in teaching and learning, in curriculum design, in how schools think about behaviour. Accountability frameworks that focus narrowly on headline outcomes can inadvertently reward schools for managing inequality rather than addressing it.
And recruitment matters too – Ralph Allen now actively looks for teachers who believe in inclusion, who are open to feedback and who are willing to adapt. Not everyone will choose that. That’s part of the point.
A question worth sitting with
If you design a system where every classroom owns disadvantage, you stop managing the gap and start closing it.
That’s not an ideological position. It’s what happens when evidence, equity and classroom practice are finally in alignment.
The question for school leaders isn’t whether the research supports mixed attainment. Increasingly, it does.
The question is whether your school is designed to let every teacher take responsibility for every child – or whether the structure quietly lets some of us off the hook.
James Marsh, Head of Sector, Supporting Education Group https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happens-when-school-decides-learners-everyones-problem-marsh-ltwse/
