Should I be worried about class sizes?

[Happyoverhere82]

DS is in year 4 at our local (lovely) primary school. There are a number of private schools in the area and I overheard parents yesterday saying they were assuming class sizes will have to increase at our school as they had lots of friends who were leaving the private schools because of VAT. DS class is already at 30 children, and we were concerned already as theres a new housing estate going up 1/2 mile down the road! If all these children leave the private schools where will they go? All the primary schools near here are either outstanding/good so very sought after and probably a good alternative option for the parents who have been priced out of their schools. DH thinks we should talk to the head about it but I dont want to be alarmist! Though I'm very concerned.

Cross-posted - yes, a Head can decide not to put up a case for prejudice to the school in order to admit above PAN, and can allow class sizes to groe in this way. In current cash-strapped times, this may occur more frequently.

I am assuming if a local private school goes bust and there are suddenly loads of kids to place then the LA will just create bulge classes in certain schools, just like they did during the baby boom years. Hopefully if this happens the private schools will give the parents at least one term’s notice and the LA will have time to plan. The problem where I live is there aren’t many LA schools left so can they force non LA schools to do bulges? Can’t remember.

And where schools are their own admissions authorities, they can admit without appeal iirc. I’m used to a co-ordinated admissions / appeals arrangement for an area but I appreciate this may not be universal.

Yes our is a church school and its own admissions authority and routinely takes in extra kids quite happily!

They might go up, my understanding is the school has limited control over it if it’s the local authority who allocate places, so while you can discuss with the Head, they may not be able to say much.

But also bear in mind that private school pupils tend to travel. The people I know with primary kids at private school drive 30-60mins to get there. So the impact may not be in the immediate vicinity of the private school.

The flip side is low class sizes can be problematic. My friend's dd has a class of 11. 6 boys, 5 girls. The other 4 girls bully the dd and have excluded her from everything. A class of 30 would have meant the dd could switch friendship groups but as it is the only solution is to leave her in the school and hope it resolved but risk her being bullied every day or remove her.

In London, in areas with falling rolls where they are worried about funding and closure I suspect they will happily take anyone they can.

Well yes, if your child's class isn't at capacity, then the number of students will rise if new pupils apply. But only up to the set limit. You won't walk in and find the kids desk sharing because there's now 60 kids in there.

Of those seven families, how many have children in your son's year? How many spaces are there? Ultimately parents will have to make a choice between paying more or taking a less than desirous school out of area

I think it is good for their social skills to have new joiners. Especially pending secondary school transition. It helps them all. So as long as there is no overcrowding and teaching is good, it should be fine. We have had a few private school kids join and if anything they have upped the standard for the remaining class and they moved as they were targeting grammar anyway. So I think they just translate to extra funding for the school and good SATs results.

@Araminta1003 yes the state infant school in Dulwich (big private school area) has had a big banner saying "places available" for ages.
In certain parts of the country many primaries are undersubscribed.

Quite - my friend’s KS2 daughter was in a class of 42 last year!

Our local state schools are not full, they take in kids from far afield. Maybe find out if there are primary schools in your area that are similarly running on small rolls.

Get your Parents Forum to raise a strongly worded request to HT and Governors that school will not go above PAN by more than x students.

My dd was in a primary Y5 class of 32, experienced lockdown and severe SEN and behaviour issues in her class. Still: She got 120, 118 and 115 in her SATS, she is now top stream everything at secondary and heading for a clean sweep of 8s and 9s (she is Y9).

It is perfectly possible to operate larger classes effectively AND a good secondary school counts. Focus on secondary, that’s where you can make a huge difference in education outcomes.

That is tough. I remember a friend who taught in Slough in the 1970s talking about huge classes like this, when the funding was so bad they relied on parent volunteers and a Xerox that barely worked and would run out of paper before the end of each term

hopefully nowadays there are at least some good TAs to help, and there are other tools also such as PowerPoint and whiteboards and speedy colour printing .

But at a human level - how on earth does any teacher cope with 42 in a classroom? It’s hard to imagine how it is even possible, unless they designed the school so a few classrooms can “zip together” by removing a dividing wall, or function in open plan.

In our area too, especially at KS1 you can literally pick the school you want to go to in my area. Everywhere has spaces. Schools are spending budget to advertise better, trying to maintain the school rolls so income doesn’t plummet. It’s a real issue. Bring in the private school kids. We need you!

My DD was out of school for two months after we moved due to all the schools being full until we won an appeal (making her class size 31). Its not as easy as people think.

I would say that is very uncommon. I have encountered - some time ago now - a school where two year groups were taught separately in the morning in class sizes of just under 20, and together in the afternoon as a mixed age class of 36-38. It’s a horrible compromise when a school cannot afford to pay 2 teachers full time (class sizes of close to 30 are best in terms of covering the costs of staff employed to teach them).

I have not encountered a full time class of 42. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I do think they are rare.

I'm not worried for me, specifically.

DD is in a class of 17 and her school is heavily undersubscribed. As a result, the school has recently merged Y3/4/5 into 2 classes of 30+ instead of 3 of ~20. The nearest private school is very small and I wouldn't be surprised if they end up closing. If DD's class grows to say, 25, that's still a reasonably small class but they will have enough funding not to merge classes, I hope.

For other schools, a lot of parents will be being turned down for their first choice schools. Other schools will just keep taking children on and not care.

33 is absolutely noticeable. My SD was in a class of 34 at one point and the whole year was miserable, her self-esteem nose-dived, she hated going to school and she got headlice every week.

I agree it’s rare, I’d not come across it before. My friend (who was a governor at the school) said it was because they couldn’t afford a second teacher with “only” 42 kids hence having a single class.

But it does show it’s not unprecedented, and that if there is a big influx of primary kids then huge classes could well result.

I don’t see this happening widely given the falling birth rate but the picture is very patchy. If a prep school closed a class of this size may be more likely than eg a LA agreeing to pay for transport for say 15 kids to go to a school on other side of the county which does have capacity.

A prep school is likely to draw in children from a wider area, though - and perhaps disproportionately from areas with ‘somewhat less good’ (and therefore under-subscribed) state alternatives.

I would see it as more likely that a small number of previous prep school
pupils might be distributed to each of a number of local primaries (bringing classes to 31 or 32) with under-subscribed less good schools taking the remainder, rather than any individual school taking 11 or 12 to give a class of 42.

Small schools with ‘lumpy’ year group sizes (eg a school that has a nominal PAN of 15 but actually admits 8 -20 depending on local birth rates, usually averaging out to mixed year class sizes of around 30) may have to get creative about mixing year groups. So in the example of 42, it might have been better to mix with the class above and class below to end up with - at worst - 3 classes of 34, and possibly less if those classes were not absolutely full.

a full time class of 42 would be in the Daily Mail with lots of sad faces

What country do you live in? In England, in the academic year 23/24, only 8 infant classes had 36+ pupils. So it is very strange all your local primary have infant class sizes of 40+.

My mum was teaching at the end of the 1950s. She reckoned that if you haven't taught a class of 46 in a cloakroom on a wet day then you haven't lived.

It was a purposed built school on a housing estate but they had totally underestimated the space needed. Reception were in the church hall down the road and had to clear up everything each day so that it could be used for Guides, whist drives etc. There were classes in the library and dining hall and still one class without a home. So every class had to have one lesson a week in the cloakroom so that the homeless class could get classroom time.

I asked her what on earth she did. She said saying times tables and singing.

All of the local state primaries near us have class sizes of 40.

”near us”…. how many are we actually talking about here @CocoDC ?

How on earth do you have this insight?

And your child…. in one of these schools and in a class of 40 plus?

It is going to vary by age range.

y4 is the year (birth years 2015 and 2016) is the last bulge group before the population starts dropping.

London would need to find 1800 students ( equivalent to 60 reception classes worth of children) to switch from private to state to make up for the drop in numbers of children who started reception this September.

Meanwhile there is only 1 high school with a place in year 7 in my borough available for in year transfers. All other years in all other high schools are at capacity.

https://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/news-and-press-releases/2024/national-primary-offer-day-2024-98-get-preferred-school-place