They just place everyone according to ability here. Retards tend to have their own special classes so they can get their own proper support and teaching and shit, while everyone else got placed in classes according to ability. If you were good at maths but shit at english, you'd be in the top class for maths and a lower one for english. I liked the system, it means you're always in a class with people of a similar skill to you in that subject and you're not being dragged down by the fact that teachers had to accomodate them.

For instance, I was in the third class for science (If you didn't take science as an additional subject at GCSE, you couldn't be in the top two) and I was stuck with some people who really didn't science all that much and it was painful; a good half the lesson would involve the teacher having to simplify the concepts over and over again just to explain something simple (An example being people who didn't get the concept that light has a speed/ isn't instantaneous travel or that an oil rig isn't divers going to the bottom of the sea to get the oil in big barrels - yes, an actual idiot believed that). It was infuriating because I'd just end up sitting there being useless because I'd finished all the work. Thankfully, that was a one-off, and all my other classes were with people who weren't bumbling retards. The actual autistic kids had their own block entirely to themselves so we never really saw them much.

So yeah, I can fully agree that mixed skill-level classes are bad. For the smarter kids it makes them have to slow down their learning to let the uh, less-able kids to catch up. And the less-able kids feel pressured to catch up to the smarter kids and thus they probably don't do as well. Placing smart kids with other smart kids and dumb kids with other dumb kids is better for everyone involved.

If your reading ability doesn't match your grade level then you should undergo constant and overbearing remediation until it does.

In the UK you have separate areas for the disabled kids to learn at whatever pace, and kids depending on whether they were good or bad at the subject got split into groups.

E.g. Set 1 was the kids getting 70%/A's, Set 4 was those who were struggling to get D's/40%.

It was kinda ok, but if you got put in a set you were stuck there until you miraculously improved by yourself (as the Sets meant teachers just taught slowly, and couldn't just be taught your way to Set 1), or made a fuss.

For example, I was decent at Welsh (went into the first language class), but the second I went under 50% in a test because the teacher decided to teach only in Welsh I got sent to the lower set where I learnt nothing and passed the course with little effort (the sets were tied to the exam papers;  if you got into lower sets, the papers got easier but the max grade also lower, I got the highest mark, a C for Welsh).

My brother nearly had the same shit pulled in him in Maths and got placed with retards, but he complained... still had to sit in for a fucking year to do a test and PROVE it was too easy, not as if the teachers could see it in him themselves...

In Ireland I don't quite know, but in Prinary school if you did bad, you were just held back a year until you did learn.