I have made the decision to conduct my independent project analysing if when a student is placed into an ability set or mixed ability set if it has any relationship to their behaviour. I feel that it is a common misconception that students from top sets are well behaved and get on with the work, whereas lower sets are hard to handle and struggle to stay focused on the topic of mathematics that they are learning. This was a belief of mine until recently on my second-year placement where I noticed that this was completely contradicted. The bottom set that I had was well behaved, tried to do all the work with varying levels of success, whereas my 2nd set out of 4 were known for being difficult, didn’t seem interested in doing the work and would often fail to do any of the work that they were set. This, at the time, confused me. I couldn’t understand how this could happen, hence I will now be delving deeper into this issue to see if there is any correlation, finding out if there is, what the reasons could be and potentially how to combat the problem, and vice versa if there is no correlation, the reasons why a particular class are not as well behaved as another. I will also be discovering what both students and teachers believe about the behaviour in their mathematics classes.