Blog: Does (class) size matter?

Private schools should consider increasing class sizes to keep fees down as the credit crisis bites, the head of the Independent Association of Prep Schools (IAPS) has said.

Smaller class sizes have long been the selling point of independent schools, and are frequently cited by parents as the main reason for educating their children privately.

Typical class sizes in prep schools range from 8 to 16, while secondary schools belonging to the Independent Schools Council boast a pupil-teacher ratio of 10-1, against an average of 26 and 21 pupils per teacher in state primary and secondary schools.

David Hanson, chief executive of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, whose members educate 130,000 children aged 3 to 13, said the sector's obsession with keeping class sizes small represented a “self-inflicted wound”.

“We need to abandon ship on the idea of small classes and focus instead on the quality of teaching and learning. The answer is quality, quality, quality. Small classes are not the answer. Many of our schools could transform their situation by increasing class size.

“There is no magic number. You can have schools that are too small. Eight or ten children to a class can be too small. It's too intensive,” he told The Times. “For the children it can be like having an intensive tutorial all the time.”

John Tranmer, headmaster of the Froebelian School in Leeds and chairman designate of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, said that, at 24, the average class size at his school was well above the average for the independent sector. But the school was nevertheless among the top 100 in the country (out of more than 20,000) in the performance tables for 11-year-olds.

“There are some schools that still think that trading on class size is the key thing. They are missing the point,” he said.

What mattered more was to attract the best teachers. Rather than have two classes of 12, each with a fully qualified teacher, schools should consider merging the two classes under a single teacher and a classroom assistant.

“You save on staffing costs, but the teaching quality is the same,” he said. “It's all about the quality of staff and the effective use of teaching assistants - they are of incredible support to teachers.”

Mr Tranmer, who used to teach in a school in Surrey with classes of eight pupils, said that the social dynamics in such small classes could be very difficult to manage.

The IAPS's change in position on class sizes is unlikely to be universally welcomed by many parents, who remain firmly attached to the notion of small classes.

On the wider issue of how private schools would weather the recession, Mr Hanson said that while some parents would struggle to pay school fees, the most vulnerable schools were likely to be very small, family-owned institutions that did not have the backing of a professional association such as the IAPS.

Within the association's 560 member schools, he predicted that at least three schools may be forced to merge to save costs.

In other cases, schools were achieving savings by forming informal federations to do bulk ordering on equipment or by sharing specialist teachers.

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