What is normal school size?

[wildpoppy]

I keep seeing people on here talk about big schools by which they seem to mean three form entry. Primary school I went to, in London, had four form entry and just seemed normal. Certainly never thought of it as a big school. Is this unusual?

outer suburb city -dd goes rc ptimary ad its 1.5 entry so 45kids at infants at least,

most we looked round had 2 classes of 30-so would say thats definate norm.

the 2more oversubscribed schools locally one is coe infants has 3form 25per class other one coe primary had opened up to 3form for some years.

The villages have pretty much kept to 1form and some havent even got full 30.

Our's was a family of 3 ... no mum or dad but the eldest said "we've moved"

strangest we ever had was a child who appeared one day with the explanation that her brother who was a Y1 pupil in the school had gone back to live with his mum who had swapped her in his place

Thats so funny? had they even applied for your school mrz or accidentally taken him to the wrong school?
Thta be so odd if just turned up to school with kid and say you are the chosen ones as for swapping kids dunno how that would work as guessing they diffrent year groups.

I think all our admissions done through lea.

We had families who swapped houses so assumed that they could swap schools too! Just turned up on Monday morning and said "We've swapped houses with Xxx so are at this school now. Unfortunately the children weren't the same age and so breached ICS regs. That took some sorting out!

All admissions should be done through LEA but some parents just don't bother! We usually have one or two in September who assume that they can start with us as we are their local school and think they don't need to bother applying. We always double check when we know existing children have younger siblings who don't appear on the preference forms, again they think that they can just start!

No they hadn't applied for school anywhere ... but what do you do when you have 3 unaccompanied children who can't tell you where they live?
The swap - involved the child moving countries

A significant proportion of our parents are sub-literate or illiterate and have attended little or no school themselves, so have no understanding of how the school admissions system works.

We are used to it, and the LEA is used to us, so it's always sorted out very quickly.

We have a large traveller population so families come and go all the time.

Ditto.

Depends where you are.

In our LEA the smallest school probably has 15 pupils and the largest 300. The average (median) is about 120 meaning lots of schools have spilt year group classes

5 form entry this year in DDs school. Outstanding school (at the moment) but it doesn't suit DD. Not much I can do about that though at this point...

I live in a city but the schools here are not big. Until the last few years when bulge classes began to be introduced, nearly all the schools had a PAN of 30.