[Gayle]

St Mary's primary school has a good system but it took me a while to get my head around it at first. Children don't progress at the same rate and so are kept with their ability group rather than it being solely down to age.

For instance there are three year groups in infants but St Mary's have four classes. So a child might do classes 1, 2 and 3 or 2, 3 and 4 or depending on how they progress 1, 2 and 4 etc. The same in juniors where there are five classes but only four year groups, so again a pupil could do any combination of four. So, at any time there could be a combination of year groups in each class, although of course, the top class is always full of the same year group because they're going to be the brightest and the oldest.

I probably haven't explained it very well but it works really well.