Class sizes in KS2

[Looking for help]

I was actually for my sins in a class of 3 in my primary 5 class back in the day in Scotland. I was at a private school that was closing the following year due to a lack of nuns and a surplus of sticks to hit us with

I can honestly say I would far rather be in a class of 40 than a class of 3 - it has scarred me for the rest of my life. There was no escape, it was absolutely awful I have never ever got over it. (The other 2 were friends, and I was on the outside I still hate them) I then moved to a normal sized school, but sadly the damage, I think was already done

[mystery]

Oh that explains such a lot.

I'm sure you are right. I think the class size research shows that there is only a benefit to much smaller class sizes if the teacher adapts their methods to make the most of it. It sounds like the nuns certainly took advantage of the small class size, but maybe not in the way the research is hinting at.

[Minesatea]

A local primary is running with a year 1 class of up to 40 (due to council c... up over place provision) so they had to go 10 over PAN. However this class has 2 teachers and several part time TA's (not sure how many FTE they work out as). I am also not sure how they manage for space but I guess they are quite small at that age!

[Looking for help]

Oh that explains such a lot.

Cheeky

[guest201]

In some cases the number of children is not an issue but the boy-girl mix can be significant, in my DS class there are 20 boys and 10 girls, the teacher describes the class as "challenging". My DD has 34 in her class one of whom is statemented and three or four who really struggle academically but her class is far less "challenging"

[mystery]

Ah so we have another class of 34 with one qualified teacher. Anyone top that?

[starmum2000]

I had 35 in a year 4 class a couple of years ago.
Tooooooo many, is all I have to say

I can!
(and thats without a full time TA who was shared across 2 large classes)

[mystery]

Oh sorry Starmum, I forgot that.

So we need to top 35. Were you teaching the class or was your child in it? Was it a problem?

As others have said presumably you could have hideous classes of 5 and fantastic ones of 100.

But why did you have such a big class? I thought school budgets were calculated so that 30 children in a class worked out fine financially so why the pressure to take in more?

[starmum2000]

I was teaching that class. Too big, in my opinion. There were too many 'lively' characters to really get a handle on the class. You know you can cope with 2 or 3 'cheeky monkeys' to put it politely, but many more than that & it does make life rather difficult.
I was only at that school for 2 terms and was led to believe that the school had recently reduced from a 3-form intake to 2, so were trying to squeeze them into 2 classes.

[mystery]

OK, so three classes each with 23 children in them did not work well financially.