That primary schools in Essex don’t have classes of 45 kids

I'm slightly younger - started primary school in 1970.

All of our work was from textbooks. Very little whole class teaching for Maths or English; we just plodded through our books at our own pace. Great if you were bright; soul destroying if you werent and just started at the same page for ages. Marking was a tick at the bottom.

No science, history, geography etc. We did "projects" which were loose and contained very little content; they were mostly a bit of general knowledge. Fair amount of PE, singing, art stuff. I did a lot of binca sewing.

30+ in a class. At the time, the unions were campaigning for maximum class sizes of 35 or something unbelievable now.

I think expectations and achievement are far, far higher now. On the other hand, we could all sit on our bums with our arms folded which is truly a challenge for lots of young people these days.

I’m in Essex. Local school has 30 children per teacher. Sometimes they find it effective to have two teachers teaching 60.

Yes, I was thinking earlier that the younger people who love to tell us that the Baby Boomers were the most fortunate people ever to have lived would be a bit taken aback if they could see what school life was like for us!

Someone i knew tried to convince me that the local 3 form entry primary school had one class that was entirely Japanese...

Husband spilled olive oil on the article?! LTB! Move to Dubai! 🙂

The Sunday Times does always seem to find rather bad examples of "these poor people struggling to live". I remember my parents rolling their eyes over a story back when interest rates were hitting 17% in the 80s, and it was something like "poor family of four is having to move out of their eight bed house before it's repossessed and can only afford a five bed". Hearts were bleeding for their poverty...

I'd wonder if 45 in a class they've got local schools with joint classes. So they have an intake of 45, which makes one class and one composite class each year. They may have just seen the PAN and assumed. It's often only 22/23 in Reception class and other years have the mixed, so better than intake of 60 for that year anyway.

My sister's class (before Infant Class Size rules) had 42-48 in over the primary years. It meant that they were often sharing 2 to a desk, sometimes children were working on the floor or in the corridor, when they did their residential trip several of them were sleeping on the floor because there weren't enough beds; practical lessons they sometimes did it in two halves, but because there was only one teacher, half would be sitting on the floor watching...

So for those who want to look back to the 70s/80s with wistful rose tinted glasses. That was the reality in some places.

Do you think they mean two form entry? Technically 60 kids in my sons class & they often do joint activities

One of my local primaries in London has 37 children in a class. I know this because I asked them if they had space when my child needed a school place. It is definitely too much.

What happens is that a lot of schools are closed due to the reducing birth rate, but they are not properly planning it, meaning that other schools end up having huge classes, as they are forced to take all the kids.

PS to my post at 14:18
And only 1 teacher per class. TAs did not exist. There were one or two teachers who were apt to resort to physical punishment, throwing board rubbers, chalk, books etc occasionally when pupils behaved badly but most did not do this.

Yes, I was at primary school from the mid 60s to the early 70s and we always had over 40 in the class. Teaching Assistants hadn't been invented then so one teacher was doing everything.

However, many children who would now be in mainstream school were then sent to special schools or were in a separate remedial class within the primary school, so we weren't seeing the children who were not reading and writing fluently by age 7/8. Also, there was no National Curriculum and it was generally expected that primary schools would concentrate on reading, writing and arithmetic, with weekly lessons in Art, RE, singing, Music & Movement, PE and a bit of general knowledge/project work at the teacher's discretion. The nearest we got to Science was an occasional Nature Study lesson. Discipline was fierce and parents usually backed teachers up, so there wasn't much disruption in class. Also, teachers were not expected to be constantly evaluating each child's progress and setting targets. These things were unknown. They stood at the front of the room and taught the whole class, no differentiation for the more or less able children, making much use of the blackboard, and they set work and tests for us to do in class, all of which was marked, with all mistakes highlighted.

It's a different world now. Better in some ways, not in all.

My children have just finished GCSEs in Essex and the classes were max 30. In fact, after options started on Y10, many classes were smaller. French was about 15 and my son's triple Sci physics class was 8!! (only the kids doing comp Sci AND triple). State school. My friend's child went to a private school in Essex (since nursery) and did significantly worse than my children even though she worked hard. Chose sizes were small but the teaching was awful. The school shut down in the summer but it was too late for her and her parents who sacrificed all those tens of thousands.

At my junior/primary school 1959 to 1965 there were 48 in my class. There were 3 classes per year, streamed A, B and C though not sure how many were in the year overall. Essex/Greater London border. It was an excellent school and quite a lot of us passed the 11 plus (but not as many as in the class of the pp upthread).

It’s illegal to be above 30 in ks1. However some London schools might struggle with numbers due to right of LAC and Send dc. KS2 is different.

They were also allowed to hit the kids to keep behaviour under control🤣

Dreadful. The children will be struggling to learn and I'm sure the teacher and TAs are exhausted.

There was 46 in my English class in secondary school in the 90s. We took it in turns to sit at tables.

I know for sure it’s only one teacher. Several TAs - more than would be in a normal class but I’m not sure exactly how many.

My youngest is at a school in London and they had 38 or 39 in a class at one point. It is a 3 form entry but so many kids had left by year 3 they needed to make savings and combined them into 2 classes. More kids have left since then so I think it’s down to about 35.

That might make sense. Here classes are often mixed year group with some schools having 3 year 3/4 classes for example. That gives an intake of 45, with children in classes of 30.

My youngest is at a school in London and they had 38 or 39 in a class at one point. It is a 3 form entry but so many kids had left by year 3 they needed to make savings and combined them into 2 classes. More kids have left since then so I think it’s down to about 35.

A PAN might be 45. This results in 3 mixed age classes over 2 years (90 /3). Thats fairly standard. Maybe the Essex parents didn’t understand PAN and class sizes are different. The paper must know this is probably untrue. I agree with others: infant size class 30 max and no school will have 45 in a class for KS2 so it’s rubbish.

This is the kind of rumour that starts from a misunderstood grain of truth. Our local schools have a sort of open plan, play based learning model in the early years, so for a couple of hours there are multiple classes all mingling around the different zones. There are multiple teachers, but I can see it's stressful for all of them and they might make a comment along the lines of having 60kids to watch/teach.

I also find those who aren't 100% sure they've made the right decision to privately educate are the most vocal at tearing state schools down, latching onto anything that proves them right.

How many teachers and TAs?

A Greek holiday for four, what’s the minimum cost there? £2k?

Sounds as if this totally real couple could do with some work on their maths and decision making skills.

Quite tired of all this ridiculous made up crap in the Reformograph.

My SiL has had a class of 60, but it was a team teaching thing and there was 2 teachers and 2 TAs. The noise though!