How Differentiation Faded
Why Challenge Belongs to Everyone
Early in my teaching career, differentiation was a non-negotiable. To do well in an observation, you had to demonstrate it everywhere. Differentiated tasks. Differentiated worksheets. Differentiated outcomes. Often pre-labelled by ability. The intention was inclusion but the effect was not always as inclusive as we believed.
I left England to teach abroad not long after that orthodoxy peaked, so I largely missed the moment the profession began to rethink it. I was reading a chapter in “The Curriculum” by Mary Myatt that prompted this reflection and gave clarity to why the shift occurred.
The change did not occur overnight, but there is a noticeable inflection point around 2021–22. The language of differentiation began to recede from official guidance and “adaptive teaching” moved in, particularly through the Early Career Framework and subsequent advice from the Education Endowment Foundation. This was not simply cosmetic but reflected a growing recognition that, in practice, differentiation had developed what Dylan Wiliam describes as “lethal mutations”.
It is worth saying that new terminology does not lead to improved practice. Like many blanket terms in education, “adaptive teaching” risks becoming elastic, stretched to cover almost anything. If it simply replaces one vague label with another, little changes. The meaningful shift is not linguistic but structural: keeping the intellectual demand constant while varying the support that secures access.
Despite being well intentioned, differentiation often translated into easier work for some pupils. Fewer concepts. Simpler language. Reduced demand. The very pupils who most needed access to powerful knowledge were sometimes those least likely to encounter it in its full form.
Myatt’s critique sharpens this further: Pre-differentiation can cap thinking. When we decide in advance who can cope with challenge, we risk rationing access to the most demanding ideas. That weakens the principle of curriculum entitlement.
Differentiated tasks tend to become closed. Prepared materials can steer pupils towards completion rather than understanding. The intellectual work is constrained before the lesson even begins.
Separating pupils by task can also limit the opportunity to surface and address misconceptions in real time. When everyone grapples with the same core ideas, teachers gain sharper diagnostic insight.
And too often, the work becomes the worksheet and with completion being visible, the understanding is harder to see. Guessing, copying or following prompts can create activity without necessarily securing any learning.
There is also the issue of workload. Creating multiple versions of a lesson is time-consuming. That investment would be defensible if outcomes were consistently stronger. The evidence for that has always been mixed. The Early Career Framework addressed this directly in standard 5:
Adaptive teaching is less likely to be valuable if it causes the teacher to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils.
The concern isn’t adaptation itself, but the artificial construction of different tasks and lowered demand.
When I first heard the term “adaptive teaching”, I assumed it was simply “responsive teaching” repackaged. A new label for something strong teachers were already doing. That was partly true, but not entirely.
Responsive teaching is, at its core, about setting clear goals, planning learning carefully, identifying what pupils have understood and where they are struggling, and then responding in ways that move them forward. It rests on structured planning, careful modelling, hinge questions, exit tickets, feedback decisions and deliberate checks for understanding. It is systematic, not improvisational.
Adaptive teaching overlaps with this, but it carries a broader framing. It includes those responsive moves while placing greater emphasis on deliberate curriculum and lesson design that anticipates variability without lowering intellectual demand. The learning goal remains common but it is the support that flexes.
What has replaced differentiation, then, is not indifference to individual need, but a clearer distinction between task and support.
The intellectual demand is shared. What adapts is the teaching. Explanation. Questioning. Modelling. Scaffolding. Feedback. Flexible grouping. Support is provided in response to what pupils show, rather than pre-loaded into tasks that predetermine what they can do. The learning intention remains common, but the route towards mastery can vary.
This is not an argument against meeting specific additional needs. Pupils with SEND or EAL may require carefully considered adjustments. But lowering conceptual demand as a default mechanism is neither equitable nor effective.
This links directly to Myatt’s argument about challenge.
We are, in many ways, a challenge-seeking species. We willingly struggle with puzzles and problems when the conditions are right. The effort is purposeful. Mistakes are part of the process with the reward often being understanding. In classrooms, challenge functions in a similar way. When pupils are trusted with demanding material and supported well, struggle is more likely to be experienced as growth rather than as failure.
The mistake was treating challenge as enrichment or extension and making it something additional, reserved and special for the more able or fastest few. Myatt argues that this is backwards and that challenge is not an add-on but an entitlement.
If we are serious about narrowing gaps, we cannot offer fundamentally different curricular diets as a routine solution. Apart from pupils with significant and very specific additional needs, the material should be demanding for all. What differs is how we secure access to it.
So differentiation receded as the profession became more precise about curriculum entitlement, coherence and challenge. It was not so much discarded as outgrown.