Eight is an important age when it comes to academic self-perception. It was in his eighth year that Wayne said the following to Eleanore Hargreaves, professor of education at the UCL Institute of Education, during her research into feedback…

“In Year 3, I was kept out of assemblies to practise handwriting skills. That was when I first began to feel less than other people. It made me feel less of a person and it did make it difficult. I found it, and still find it, extremely difficult to write. All my English lessons have not done anything for me. Being labelled as [low ability] and being given extra help because I couldn’t understand is insulting and knocks your confidence - and makes it very easy to give up.”

Eight is an age that also crops up in the research of University of Michigan psychologist Pamela Davis-Kean. She has found that middle childhood - ages 8-11 - is a critical time during which children form a picture of their abilities.

Meanwhile, research carried out earlier this year by online-tutor company Explore Learning reveals that “educational anxiety” begins at around - yep, you guessed it - eight years old. Some 61 per cent of children have experienced educational anxiety, and the main areas of concern include test worries, homework stress and being seen as less intelligent than peers.

So does that mean that this is the age when teachers have to be much more aware of how a child views their position in the academic hierarchy? Actually, that awareness needs to be there right from the start of schooling, according to Angel Urbina-Garcia, a lecturer in early childhood studies at the University of Hull.

He explains that infants develop a sense of self from the get-go and that “once you put a child in an academic environment, personal self-concept will develop into academic self-concept: ‘What can I do? What can I not do?’”

He continues: “When school children transition to primary school, they are spending five days a week in an academic environment where there are expectations. The child has to develop to perform those skills that are expected.”

Knowing the score

Becky Taylor, a senior research fellow at UCL’s Institute of Education, agrees that children cotton on to their capabilities from a very young age. “When children are moving through book bands in key stage 1, they know exactly where they sit on the hierarchy. They know who is on a harder book, who’s on an easier book,” she says.

How widely acknowledged is this fact in primary schools? It certainly hasn’t deterred most from a process of setting students by attainment, no matter how subtle they believe that process to be. At one end of the spectrum there may be very obvious “ability groupings”; at the other it may be more about where a child sits and the type of work they are given, or the language used by the teacher in their company. Children are more aware of these acts of separation than teachers may like to think. And it can have a significant, negative effect on academic self-perception, says Taylor - one that reaches far beyond the primary classroom and into secondary schools.

“There is a real focus on ability labelling in schools,” she explains. “One of the things we have found is that, when children were placed in sets in Year 7, there was a difference in self-confidence between children in the highest and lowest sets. We looked at their subject self-confidence in maths and English, but also at their general self-confidence, and there was quite a gap there, too.”

She has also found that ability labels are cemented for children when they get stuck in a particular attainment group. “One thing that came across strongly with our interviews with 11- and 12-year-olds, for our Best Practice in Grouping Students research project, was that they worked really hard to move sets, but found that they couldn’t move,” notes Taylor. “Some of them ended up feeling rather despairing because it didn’t seem to matter how much effort they put in. Research shows teachers tend to overestimate the amount that students are moved sets. Pupils may not be moving as often as teachers think they are.”

It is not just setting that is influencing academic self-concept in younger children, but also accountability. Hargreaves is currently working on a project, Children’s Life-Histories in Primary Schools, in which she is following 25 pupils through their schooling from Year 3 to Year 7. The research is in its third year.

“We’re looking at pupils who have been designated as the lowest-attainers in their class. We’re interested in how that designation affects them,” she says. “Because the policy emphasis is on maths and aspects of English, mainly writing, the children tend to learn to judge their ability and attainment by how well they do in tests of maths and writing rather than more generally.

“We have some children in our sample who struggle with maths or English, or both, but they are fantastic gymnasts or artists or scientists. But they know that those are not the right kind of talents that are valued by the system. What is valued is how well they do in maths and writing. So they tend to think that’s what makes them clever or not.”

So at a critical age when children are forming ideas about themselves as learners, education is etching in problems rather than moulding pupils for success. So what can schools do to have a more positive influence?

It starts with teachers trying to avoid identifying children by their attainment, according to Hargreaves. “It’s not the fault of teachers, it’s because of policy, which has encouraged us to think of children as attainment scores,” she says. “Teachers perceiving children as certain abilities or attainments is so damaging. Even if you have the class sitting together in different attainments, if the teacher thinks ‘Harry will never get it so I’ll stick him next to Jenny’, children will immediately pick up on that.”

Cloaking your sets

Another key intervention is positive reinforcement, says Garcia. “If you have a history of poor academic performance, your academic self-concept isn’t going to be high, but studies have found that when you start giving positive reinforcement, their academic self-concept is boosted, their self-esteem is boosted, their self-efficacy is boosted so their grades start getting better,” he explains.

And if you really do want to set children, then it’s important to make an effort to properly cloak that process, urges Taylor.

“There is a school I encountered recently where groups are given letters that are not sequenced in an order you would expect,” she says. “A number of schools in our Best Practice in Grouping Students research had sets named after authors or mathematicians. One school we visited placed pupils in sets, but they weren’t told which set they were in. We can’t say from our research what the impact of that was, but it was interesting to talk with those young people. They genuinely didn’t seem to have a strong sense of which group they were in.”

The most important thing you can do, though, is acknowledge that children in KS1 and KS2 are starting to see themselves as learners - and more specifically, to compare themselves with others. Schools have a huge responsibility to ensure that the impression each student forms about themself is a positive one. Not only that, but that the positives apply to a broader set of skills than just those areas on which children are assessed.

No one is saying that this will be easy, but most teachers would agree that it is crucial to try to get this right. Wayne is a good example of the damage that can be done if an awareness of academic self-concept is not embedded in every plan we make for every individual student.

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 16 October 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… academic self-perception”