90 kids in one class room in reception

[simpson]

I found out today that the school DD is going to start in sept is going to have 90 kids in one very large open plan class room with 3 teachers and 3 TAs.

Does anyone have experience of this??? And how does it work out???

Thanks!!!

I visit 2 different schools which both have a combined Early Years Unit (Nursery & Reception) with 120 children in the open plan room. They do have 4 separate teaching areas in each corner and you can draw the curtains during the more specific and focused carpet time. When it is "continuous provision" things can get a little crazy, but if things are managed and planned well, then it gives the children a chance to interact with all children, not just their classmates.

Is it a new school by any chance?

I don't have experience of this, but I do have experience of children with sensory processing difficulties and this sounds like a nightmare.

I can see that it would be fine for many children, but for anybody with a hearing difficulty or a behavioural SN, it sounds like a recipe for disaster - I can only assume that the classroom has been designed to have amazing acoustics - statistically it is highly unlikely that all 90 children would be able to cope with this situation if they can hear 3 different teachers teaching simultaneously...

merrymouse - you have a point.....definitely not the best environment for children with hearing difficulties, behaviour problems, attention & listening difficulties.......it seems a lot of new build schools are going this way. Some of the secondary schools I go into are now open plan and have 60 in a class with 2 teachers team teaching.

Simpson - have you seen the room? have school explained how it is going to work?

my dses nursery class is quite similar to this, not 90 children though but 60, in an open plan classroom with separate corners for carpet time, and loads of staff. at first i did wonder how that would work as it seems like a lot of children but seems to work fine and he has been happy there

my Ds was in foundation unit - so nursey and reception with 60 children - seemed to work well - it was a large space - and there was room for the reception children to sit in 2 different classes for formal learng - they were kind of round the corner from each other and a lovely outdoor space - I am not sure it would be worse than a smaller room with 30 children in it for noise

It is not a new school but it has had extensive building work over the last 6mths or so...

The 90 kids will not include nursery they will all be reception age but they are supposed to share the playground with nursery kids too (so thats another 35 kids!!).

merrymouse - that is my worry that DD will be distracted by hearing other teachers/kids etc etc.

Luckily she is not shy in the slightest and will soon tell someone if she is not happy but I can imagine that a shyer child or a child with SN may struggle

DS is in the same school (yr2) and he hates loud noise (I think due to having glue ear for most of reception and then having grommets in, so it would be a nightmare for him).

I only found out today at the jubilee party that the school had by chatting to one of the current reception teachers.

DD is in the current reception class atm as the nursery is having building work (due to finish after half term) but the classroom (reception one) although massive is not finished and over the summer holidays apparently with grow in size by about a third ready for Sept.

These 'mega' classes as I call them seem to be becoming more and more popular and as of yet I haven't heard of any complaints around the open plan nature of the classes.
It is very different from our small village school but was chatting to a friend the other day who trained at our school to become a teacher, she went from our on average 23 child primary classes to a school with a 90 child reception class when she qualified. Her teachers eye view of it is that yes, at times it can feel quite chaotic but she loves it, she loves the chance to work with the wider group of children and have the environment to really get the best out of the early years curriculum. She is very much enjoying teaching in the environment she has.
I am sure there must be provision for children who find very busy environments difficult. I know my ds would find it very hard, he is another one with glue ear problems, he finds certain pitches of loud noise unbearable and physically painful and is speech is so unclear and hard to understand I know even I as his Mum would struggle (even more then normal) to understand what he was trying to say in a busy and possibly loud classroom but that would also be true in a smaller room with less children.
I think it comes down to the facilities and the teaching space available, these 'mega' classes just wouldn't work if you shoehorned 60 children into your average sized classroom but if the room is designed for this method of teaching then from what I have heard it can work very, very well.
I would be very about the fact you have only just found out about all this though and then only through chat with the teacher rather then official channels. Maybe they are planning to go through it all at the new parent meeting in a few weeks (presuming they have one).

Lots of parents around here have deliberately done their best not to send their kids to the school with open plan KS1 or the one with a library in the middle which is linked to all classes by "arches". Of course other parents do choose those very schools.
I am sure they can work well, but I still remember my mothers stories of being taught in the corridor during WWII, and being distracted by the class behind.

There is:

"this could be a good way to teach children, we'll discuss the plans with architects, other schools, some SN specialists and only pursue this if we can really make it work for everyone".

And then there is:

"crap! We have to fit in 30 extra kids this year and we have no money, let's knock down a few walls - we'll fit them in there somehow. Wasn't there some article somewhere about some school that was all open plan and it was really cool?!"

In the current economic climate I would be concerned about the latter situation.

Good post by Merrymouse.
As with all things in Education, these things come round in cycles. Open plan teaching was very fashionable back in the day, and then it went out of fashion for all sorts of good reasons.
There are so many children who would struggle in this sort of environment (I work with children with Sp Needs in the U5 sector).

In the 60's a lot of the infant areas were built with shared linked open art/craft areas in between so no doors and you move between the classrooms if you wish.

I don't know if it would be like this, but I went to school in the US for a few years. We had one very large space, which was split by room dividers into four separate classrooms. They very much felt like separate areas. We had just as much space as you would in a separate classroom.

We each had our own class and our own teacher, but then each of the teachers also had a specialism, so we went to a different teacher for science for example. Maths and possibly English were divided up by ability. I was only a child, but looking back it was great for me. My parents were probably horrified at the thought of 120 children in one 'room' (I'd been at a tiny school in the UK with two years per class), but soon saw the advantages. They are both teachers.

RandomMess I went to a 1960s-built Infant school that was just as you describe. There was an annexe with a central area and two/three classrooms coming off it that didn't have doors, just folding screens.

Ones around where I grew up didn't have folding screens - the one I went to had individual classrooms but all the other ones on the other estates didn't and were quitely frankly odd IMHO!

It is making me a bit worried tbh, I just hate the idea that my DD's year in reception might be an experiment iyswim.

Ds1's school is like this. In reception they had one big room for 90 kids, 3 teachers and 3 ta's. Each child was in one of 3 classes with a dedicated teacher and ta, each with a base area that could be curtained off if needed and a large shared area plus dedicated loos, cloakrooms and a large outside play area, some undercover, that they could all access freely during their 'student led learning' time.

It always seemed noisy and chaotic, especially when all the parents piled in at home time but the kids seemed to do ok (ofsted outstanding).

However it was nothing compared with y1 and y2, which were all in one long room, each with their own base rooms but oh so noisy and crowded! Again kids seem to thrive for the most part and ds2 is going to start next September so we're happy enough with Joe it worked for ds1 to choose it for ds2. And ds2 is off to a junior school where they have 5 classes in each year, each year group having a shared area with 5 base rooms coming off it so hopefully it won't come as too much of a shock to him after being used to a busy environment. (compared with his cousin who is in a village school with fewer kids in entire primary school than one year of his infant school - ds1 definitely has the better teaching and results...)