The stule of teaching and learning mathematics and the type of tasks used affect the conceptions, attitudes and views of mathematics held by teachers and pupils. Our purpose in this research study is to investigate the occurence of small group learning and the methods of co-operative learning in school mathematics in Finland and in England. Furthermore, we wish to draw more educators' and researchers' attention to the role of these methods of learning and to the importance of task design in implementing them into school mathematics. We conclude that small group learning is not common in the teaching and learning of mathematics and that the tasks used in school mathematics determine the teaching and learning styles and these are not conducive to the methods of contemporary co-operaive learning.