Advanced Higher - how many kids per class?

[OwlCityisthemostunderrated]

How many kids do you expect to be in an Advanced Higher class?

I assumed it would be relatively few per class. I remember my SYS being less than 10 in each class.

Between 22-23 in my sons school (state) he had:

22 pupils in advanced higher Maths class
12 chemistry AH
Mechanics AH 7
Physics AH 8
Music AH 7

I'm curious to know this too. DD is going to do AH History next year in another school (consortium) and thinks she's the only person going from her school. I don't know how many there'll be from other schools / that school.

In ds's school (low performing), for his AHs it started at around 10 in AH Maths, 4 in AH Physics. Within a couple of months it was around 7 and 3 respectively.

I remember him saying there were was a full class of 25ish in AH English on day 1 but by the end of the first week there were only around 10 left once they realised what was involved. I don't know how many finished the course.

There was very little staff resource allocated to the classes, and a lot of the time they gave them videos recorded during the pandemic, with terrible audio, to watch which totally disengaged them. For study periods they put everyone from different subjects in the library with no supervision and it was more like a youth club, so studying even for those that wanted to was impossible. They only saw their AH teacher once or twice a week. He went from being a straight A student to C grades for AH. Thankfully he had his unconditional uni offers (which might also have contributed to the lower grade!)

A lot of the content from his AH maths and physics was repeated in his engineering degree year 1, so at least it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Mine has I think 17 in AH maths and about 10 in Comp Sci

There’s 18 in AH physics at the moment. Ds isn’t doing it but I noticed because I thought that was quite a substantial number for the subject and wondered if that was unusual. I don’t know if more than that started the course. There’s 3 in computer science, 5 in music and 20 in maths.

Thank you all. That’s very helpful.

DS has 22 in his class for AH history, which I thought was a huge number.

Private school, and when we went for the visit they said typically 5 to 10 per AH class.

I am astonished that the teacher is managing the workload. On the assumption that they were small classes I had been encouraged DS to really engage, go along to the extra study sessions, ask for feedback etc. But this week DS got an email from the teacher essentially asking him to please stop asking questions, because the teacher was having to work past 5:30 to get through his workload.

It’s a shame because one of the things we were hoping for was a relaxed environment where he could really engage with the subject. @Blanketpolicy ’s post really helps me to check our privilege there though, so thank you.

humble brag alert!

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That is a shame @OwlCityisthemostunderrated I wouldn’t be happy with that especially when you are paying for it. I feel that ds3, in his state school, has had a lot of feedback and individual attention especially in music and computer science. It is quite a high achieving school generally. That’s partly due to catchment but I’m sure it’s also due to the extra study classes and other interventions put in place by teachers and SLT.

It really really depends on both the school and the subject. Back in the day when I did CSYS French there were 2 of us, and we were joined by another 2 from the local catholic school. But that was in a school where most kids left at 16 and very few went on to university/poly.

In my kids' school they send much higher numbers to uni, and lots of kids stay on for S6. DD did Adv H drama last year and I think there were 8 or 9 of them. She also did Adv H geography and there were about the same number. DS a couple of years ago did Adv H biology and there were loads - about 15 or 18, most were headed for Uni to do medicine, dentistry, pharmacology and that sort of thing.

Every year the school offers a good range of Adv H subjects as there is the demand for them. In other schools which are smaller or have fewer pupils thinking about uni, they concentrate on more nat 5s or Highers.

I teach in an area of fairly high deprivation. I started with 17 in my AH class this year (largest class we've ever had) and ended up presenting 14.

I think I have 10 on my class list for next session. I'm getting a third of the time knocked off as 'self-study time' for them, so four periods instead of six. It's really going to limit the course teaching.

It will depend on the school/subject - my son's school is quite small and most of his Higher classes weren't that big (some were tiny).

Ds is the only person in his school doing AH Computing and is having to do a lot of the work himself. He is going to a consortium school for AH maths and think started with 4 from our school that has maybe dropped to 2

His school offers very few AH courses so is kind of limited in the subjects he could choose.

Depends on the subject.
Dd is in 5th year and there is Only 2 in the AH computing class and about 6/7 in the higher computing class so the class was put together.
They tend to only run a higher or advanced higher if there is at least 6/8 pupils choosing it.
They aren’t running an advanced higher computing next year so she is doing a NPA level 6 in software development and web design at college as one of her subject choices instead.
The school some years only teaches computing to national 5 level as hardly anyone wants to take it. There was only about 20 in her national 5 class last year.

so apparently the school will pay a taxi to the other school, but not transport back. WTF??? Has this happened to anyone else?

At ds’s school anyone wanting to do an AH at another school had to arrange their own transport both ways. There was also no guarantee timetables wouldn’t clash and it was up to the student to catch up on missed periods.

This kind of makes sense to me. We send our college kids in taxis because the timings of the school day mean they wouldn't manage on the bus, unless they left school very very early. As it is, we can send them in taxis at 12.30pm and they can start a college class at 1pm. We don't taxi back because there are no pressing time issues. We do this from S4 onwards.

DS told he may not be able to take Higher Modern Studies as it may clash with day release at the local college where he will do a course in S6. He's thinking of just doing Nat5 Modern Studies instead - less effort in terms of catching up.

I understand the taxi thing. Makes sense for the pupils to be prompt for teaching purposes, not so much urgency at the end so they can make their own way back home via public transport.

My DS got free return train tickets for his AH class at a Hub. He needed to get back to school to another AH lesson in the afternoon and the timing was tight.