There is, on the surface, a compelling logic about the campaign of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) to reduce the average class size in the country’s primary schools. Intuitively, parents and politicians agree that reducing the number of pupils in primary school classes would be a good thing. Smaller classes would mean more individual attention for children, less distractions, less noise. It seems obvious that the result would be a virtuous circle that delivers better education and reduces the chances of children leaving primary school, as thousands do at the moment, without basic literacy and numeracy skills.
Achieving the INTO’s goal will be an expensive business requiring the employment of thousands more teachers and the building of hundreds of new classrooms, but there are few dissenting voices. The government is committed to reducing the average class size from the current 24.2 to 20 or less, though its timescale is fluid.
Mary Hanafin, the minister for education, has described reduction as a noble aspiration, but is clearly anxious about the bill. The pressure for change, though, will be unrelenting. Last month the Into invited senators and TDs to go back to school “to see for themselves the large classes in primary schools” so that the “damaging effect . . . on children’s primary education” could be made clear.
Come the next election, every political party will recommit itself to Hanafin’s noble aspiration and at some point in the near future a minister for education will start to spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money recruiting teachers and building classrooms to meet the targets.
It might come as a shock some years later when the minister discovers that all that spending may have placated teachers and pleased parents but it actually did little or nothing to improve the educational achievements of children.
Troublingly, for the INTO and the political parties who sign up to the organisation’s campaign, the evidence from other countries on the benefits of reduced class sizes is far from conclusive. Clearly there is a point at which the benefits must start to kick in — if we doubled the education budget and cut class sizes in half, then there probably would be a sharp improvement in the performance of some children — but determining that point, and establishing whether the cost of reaching it would be worthwhile, are far more problematic.
Detailed academic studies in America have indicated that the easy assumption that smaller class sizes improve performance is difficult to validate. Some studies show that children underperform in smaller classes, others show marginal improvement and most show little or no change.
It is, undoubtedly, an area of academic dispute, but it is clear from the wealth of material available that there is no conclusive link between smaller classes and better performance. At the extreme ends of the scale there will be differences — more than 35 pupils or less than 16 — but in the middle of the scale, which is where Ireland’s average class size rests, fiddling with the numbers is unlikely to deliver measurably better results.
For example, after studying 163 primary schools in Connecticut, Professor Caroline Hoxby of Harvard University concluded: “The results of the study are easy to summarise. There appear to be no effects of class-size reductions. This is true, even though I would be able to identify statistically small improvements in student achievement.”
So why is the government (and for that matter, the other political parties) committed to spending hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money on a policy that is unlikely to improve the educational achievements of Irish children? Has it just been hoodwinked by the INTO? Does it always believe what it is told, so long as the message is demonstrably popular? Or does it not bother to research its policies before it commits to them? Hanafin’s clear objective should be to ensure that, as a bare minimum, Irish children are literate and numerate when they leave primary school. Her resources are finite, so it should be imperative that her officials in the department of education devise policies that can deliver measurable improvement.
She does not exist to pander to teachers’ unions or to offer false hope to parents: her job has to focus on delivering the best possible outcome for children. To do that effectively, she has to be able to determine the benefits and costs of those policies, and make a simple assessment: is it worth it? The answer, when it comes to the costs of reducing average class sizes, is no. It may be the popular route to follow, but it will not deliver results for the people who matter — the children. Smaller classes would, of course, make teachers lives a bit easier — fewer parents to deal with, fewer children to teach, less paperwork, less hassle — but the benefits are far outweighed by the costs.
Hanafin’s first priority should be to gather evidence, so that her policies can be based on reality rather than hope. The starting point has to be a wholehearted embrace of standardised testing of primary school children at different stages of their development. Testing has to be the base camp from which she and her department can start to develop policies that actually deal with the problems in our education system.
If Hanafin could demonstrate that the children of Mayo, where the average class size is 21, are significantly more advanced at the age of seven than the children of Kildare, where the average class size is 27.2, and that the gap had widened further by the time they reached 11, then she and the INTO could at least claim that money spent on reducing Kildare’s classes was well spent. If the gap was not significant, or if Kildare’s children were actually performing better, then she would have to reconsider (and the evidence which exists in Ireland suggests that children in larger classes do better, on average, than children in smaller classes).
Either way, the absence of information makes her policy formation a guessing game and so it is not surprising that she chooses to guess the way the unions want her to guess.
If reducing class sizes does not guarantee a better education for our children, what does? Again, the evidence from Ireland may be scarce but information from other countries indicates that the quality of teachers has a significant impact on the performance of children, and so does the quality and availability of pre-school education.
Instead of spending hundreds of millions by hiring extra teachers so that class sizes can edge down a few points, Hanafin could achieve far better results by spending that money on children before they even step inside the primary school gates.
Attracting more qualified teachers is problematic because unions would not countenance large pay differentials at entry. However, if the evidence shows that a highly qualified mathematics graduate is likely to deliver more able children, then why do we not consider paying more for teachers who enter the profession with more suitable qualifications for teaching our children? Evidence, unfortunately, is a dangerous commodity because it forces policy makers to challenge the casually accepted wisdoms of the day. It is much simpler, and much less confrontational, to drift along and pump money into schools, hospitals, roads, trams, even national stadiums, without demanding any accountability for the money that has been spent.
It is one of the drawbacks of economic prosperity: governments can spend without really thinking about it. Tax revenue pours in and ministers scrabble to get their hands on it so that they can dole it out to a grateful nation. Come election time the government parties can trot out the figures and exult in the sheer scale of the spending they have indulged for the previous five years.
The education of our children demands more exacting standards. Government policy must focus on what is best for children, and it must be based on reality. The objective has to be a simple one: to deliver the best possible opportunities to all children. That will not be achieved by targeting finite resources at a misguided, if instinctively popular, policy of reducing average class sizes.
