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

[Dabralor]

Hello. Just read the most bizarre article in the Sunday times about a family - they pay 45 grand a year to fund their children through private school, supposedly to avoid them having to use the state sector where there are ‘often’ 45 children in a class. Surely this can’t be true? I’ve never heard of this is 25 years teaching primary, albeit not in Essex.

(For those concerned, the family can no longer afford gym membership, beauty treatments or more than one foreign holiday a year. And moving to Dubai is not an option.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

My son was in a year six class of 45 children, in Essex.

They had 2 teachers in the mornings though and were split for maths and literacy.

Quite common in the sixties to have classes of well over 40 maybe almost 50 but the kids who were SEN or behaviour problems were in a special class of about 15.

Not always. My sister's class who had around 45 in as I said upthread had probably about ten children who had clear behavioural needs.
One of them was finally moved to a special school in year 6, the school having been asking for help for years, after he nearly strangled a fellow classmate. There were twins who had learning difficulties who were very disruptive, then another three or four who we could often hear shouting - even though my classroom was the other side of the hall. There was another who charged through the playground with a fence post he'd ripped out of the ground threatening a teacher who'd called him to go inside (probably for vandalising the fence post!).

My form was generally lovely, but the form below us were so bad that teachers left the school rather than risk having them!

I went to secondary school in the mid 00s and it was quite common to have up to 38 in a class. Even my history A level had that many (although bizarrely there were fewer of us taking English but that was split into 2 smaller classes, I can only assume because they didn't expect so many to choose history).

My sister was the only teacher in a nursery class that had 70 kids a year or two ago, but she had 5/6 TAs (or whatever the number needed to meet the adult to child ratio). They basically used two classes and opened up the corridor in between with the attached toilets to make one very large space.

They are consulting on which schools to lower the PAN in here due to falling numbers.

Maybe the could move down here (lots of hospitals and a military area!)

At my primary school it was 48 to a class. That was late 50s early 60s so there are classrooms that would work but don't think that's happened in a long time.

Do they team teach possibly?!

My daughter has 34 in her class, state school.

Most I’ve had in my class was 39…this was in my second year of teaching, back in 1996, and I had a Year 3 class in a mobile ‘Prefab’ classroom. It was bonkers! No TAs either…just me and 39 x 7 year olds in a damp, leaky, prefab, a good 5 minute walk away from the main school building. All good fun 😬

I can’t imagine 45 primary aged children would even fit in a classroom though!!

When I taught in England the classes capped at 33, though some local authorities didn’t count twins as two children as if the parents wanted them in the same class, one space entitled the other. So the biggest I ever had was 35 (two sets of twins).

My mother actually started school in a class of 45 in 1963 because one of the teachers eloped over the summer and therefore had to leave the workforce. When they got a new teacher the class was not split 22/23, but 16/29 because the class size was dictated by the size of the available classrooms 🙃

@latetothefisting Nursery has different rules. It’s a staffing ratio, not a teacher ratio. Often a teacher in charge but TAs or nursery nurses are the staff.

Secondary is limited by size of classroom. If schools have big rooms, they don’t necessarily have to limit group size. Most schools don’t have large teaching spaces though.

I'm in Essex and one of our local primaries also has two teachers teaching 60 children in one large room, certainly for reception don't know about older years.

Not in Essex but a local secondary has had groups of between 60-90 children in classes.

This was due to staff shortages (they quit) and so there were classes where a teacher was just supervising silent textbook work. It made the local news.

Needless to say that this isn’t a popular school.

Hi think these big supersized classes with two teachers might perhaps be separate classes in an open plan setting. My mum taught like this in the 90s - she said it was shite. She didn’t mince her words, my mum.

@Dabralor Yes. Often in hen and chickens classrooms. One larger one and probably 2 or more smaller side rooms for quiet work. DD had 66 dc in her YR class before 30 limit and 2 teachers and I think 2 or 3 TAs in YR! Difficult to imagine now.

45 kids in a class?! That sounds like something from the 1960s or 1970s. When I was at primary school from 1968 - 1975,it was not uncommon to have 36 kids in a class. Class sizes of less than 30 were very rare. But that seems to be a thing of the past. My DGD left school a year ago and she said there was never more than 30 in a class.