What class size would you count as too small?

[LittleLizaJane]

I would’ve thought anything under 10 was too small (which was the smallest class I’d ever been in - 2 girls/8 boys and we just about worked out)

Now I’ve got a new job at a village school and they have a year 1/2/3/4 class (although no year 1s) with 6 pupils and a 5/6 with 6 pupils also.

Honestly there has been no arguing about pairs or general class unpleasantness, there’s been 1 small argument at break-time (in the past month) but that was due to a girl with a learning disability misunderstanding something and getting upset.

Around 1/4 of the children have varied disabilities but are all treated extremely nicely by the other children, never singled out or anything.

In conclusion (I’m not sure how this became so long), I now think the smallest class size is probably 5 or 6, as long as there is a few others to play with at break. Opinions?

I’m interested in secondary too - the adjoining senior school has around 6/7 per class (but mostly without blended years) from the looks of things and it seems pretty calm over there too.

Our village school had 11 in reception. What a luxury!. It's now 30.
But it depends on whether your year group is shared, is this reception, sharing year 1, 2, 3 years?

Grammar There’s no reception at all currently! I’ve heard there’s supposed to be a few next year but I don’t know what’ll happen then.

I would have thought a very small class - like the 2/3 per year you have would work more like a large family than a class, and could work.
I'd say 10 per class of a single age group could be hard - too big to be an individual, too small to form groups with like minded kids.
In a typical school environment, I'd say 15 per class. But it sounds like you might be very remote (Scottish island, maybe), and so the whole dynamics are different.

That sounds wonderful! My primary had 20 across three years and it made for a very supportive environment.

So there's 12 children in the entire school, 3 of whom has additional needs? I don't know, it sounds kinda suffocating to literally not be able to get away from other people, to play with someone different, to not really have anyone else to compete and push against to achieve etc

We looked at small village schools for our DS, one had 20 in YR-2 and 13 in KS2. The KS2 pupils were doing PE when we looked round and that looked challenging - with the different sizes of the pupils from some tiny 7 year olds to 11 year olds almost the size of an adult.

Small class sizes are wonderful but that sounds very extreme! DD is at a small village school, blended years etc. Only downside is that the classes can become very one sided in terms of sex of the children. No bother really except I think she would like a few more girls to join him her games.

We have 30 kids per class in ours, 3 form entry and I thought that was big until I spoke to a friend who’s kids go to a primary with 4 classes of 30 per year. (That’s right, we are in a London borough)

My village school has 2 classes , 20 in each. It's a fantastic school and the older ones are very good with younger ones

The next village has 9 kids in the whole school , my friends 2 kids go to and they love it.

in small groups the dynamics become more like extended family (think cousins) but the problem educationally can be pushing them beyond their comfort zone taking risks exploring varied subjects and developing skills to cope away from their small support group. prepping them for further education for meeting others and learning how to judge outsiders to ensure healthy relationships.

Ds is private and they do max 14 in a class which I think is perfect. There’s currently 10 in his class and I’ve been to see head about intake for next year as Ds is struggling a bit with some of the boys in his class and there is no where for him to go with it really.

I’m amazed by the size of the Secondary School, how many pupils are there in total? How do they cope with all the different subjects, do teachers have to double up?

@ineedaholidaynow They tend to even triple up and they take turns teaching PE, so that’s 4 subjects for some!

I'm not a teacher but my primary school had 20 across the infants/nursery and 20 across the juniors. My class had 5 kids in. The year above had 3.

I'd be more concerned about how the school is funded and its future if there are only 12 children in the school and at least two teachers and other staff. It doesn't sound sustainable, particularly if s couple of kids were to leave. Around me smaller schools are being closed and they're much larger than this one.

@Justmeandtwokids I thought so too but it’s been open for around 100 years, I think they have some sort of benefactor or something injecting money to keep them afloat, the largest number of pupils they’ve ever had across the entire school has been 80 from what I’ve heard - now it’s around 40

My daughters prep school is tiny -48 on the roll currently. Her class is year 3+4 combined and is 9 or ten of them I think. It's lovely. They do have a few disagreements but it means they all play together - the year sixes play with young children and it is one big family.

My primary was like this, it was a convent, and there were six of us in primary seven, eight in primary six (Scotland, last two years of primary)

Clearly I didn't know any different but what I can say is that I was very advanced as the teachers worked with us individually at our own pace, the atmosphere was lovely and we all got on and were close friends.

However I then went into a main stream secondary and it was very difficult, firstly there was thirty of us, which was a huge shock to me, I'd never seen anything like it, and I was ahead of the rest of the class so had to do work I'd done two years previously. Teachers basically worked to the lowest common denominator and there was little to no individual support like I previously had.

The upshot was i rebelled, got into a shit load of trouble, struggled to adapt, and was bored shitless.

So as much as I think it works well in isolation I can honestly say the transition to secondary needs to be very carefully managed or it can be very damaging,

Our primary school had 38 in our class (before they limited it) and that was way too many. Contrast this to when I had private music lessons in sixth form because nobody else picked the subject, and I would certainly say that smaller class sizes are better - but 1 is awkward! Haha.

When I went to school, my class size was 3-5 pupils. As a pupil it was lovely as the teachers knew us so well and I believe my education benefited from such small classes

I think anything under 15 is too small and anything under 20 not really ideal.

If kids have friendship issues, they need to have some other options. 1 bad egg in a class of 10 could make for some unhappy kids.

Smaller classes - how on earth do you play any kind of team sport? How do you have matches against other schools?

There are special Small Schools leagues for village schools (which my DS school, with a PAN of 15, does quite well at).

I'm a TA in an Early Years class of 19, its lovely. Kind of dreading next year when we are back to 30 again.

I think it really depends. In general smaller classes I would imagine are much more risky. If there happen to be 4 or 5 very sporty kids on your age group and you're not it could be very lonely. My DC are in a classes of 15-20 which I love. They all know each other and are bonded but there's more opportunities to choose friends etc.