Emily McCarren's List: Class Size Issues

• Two teachers at St John Mosley Common CE Primary School swap classes to experience the difference between teaching a class of 18 and one of 28 pupils.

• Over the past three decades, the average pupil-teacher ratio in independent schools has fallen from 12.6 to 8.3. In state schools, it has dropped too but remains at 26 for primary and 20.6 for secondary schools.
• teachers evangelical about the benefits of smaller classes.

• “It suggests the quality of teaching is the same in the private and publicly-funded sectors, except that the average class size in the private sector is 13 and in the public sector 25,” he says.

  “In other words, teachers in the state sector are delivering the same quality of teaching in classes of 25 that their private school counterparts are delivering in classes of 13.

  “The reason that class sizes in independent schools are so small is because they need to be, because the teaching is less good than in the state sector.”

  There’s no doubt that teachers prefer smaller classes but do they bring any measurable improvement in results?

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• While it might seem obvious that large class sizes put greater demands on teachers, and thus detract from learning, research over the past 35 years offers little evidence to support the sentiment. Studies do show that small class sizes bring small academic gains in kindergarten and first grade, with some reports maintaining that those early educational benefits carry through eighth grade.
• Brian Stecher, associate director of RAND Education
• avid Figlio, professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University, summarized it this way: "There's very little evidence that a class size of 22 is that much better than a class size of 25 or 27. But just try to increase class sizes from 22 to 27, and parents will scream bloody murder."
• "It's much better to have a large class with a good teacher than a small class with a mediocre teacher," said Eric Hanushek, education researcher at Stanford University, who said research even took into account classes as large as 37.

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