Secondary teachers: Science and Technology versus English

[roisin]

A secondary school does not have great results in English compared to other subjects.

Whereas Science and Tech is taught in 9 classes for KS3 year groups (average class size 21), English is taught in just 7 classes, (average class size 27, top sets up to 32).

Also for double Science GCSE award they have 4 (hourly) lessons a week, whereas for the two English GCSEs they have just 3.

Is this standard practice in all secondary schools?

largest class I have is 29, but that is top set year 11. Most of our classes are below 28 in science. Not sure what they have in english.

Unusaul to have more science lesson than english I would have though.

For double science ours get 4x 70 mins a week

At dd1 secondary school (selective state grammar) all KS3 teaching is in form groups of 32 children each [pained emoticon]. The only exception is maths which is setted from Y8 onwards into four groups (96 kids in each year group), with smaller nos in the lower sets.

according to dh this isn't unusual, as Double Science is seen in some schools as 2 separate GCSE's it gets two 'lots' of teaching time whereas English is classed as one subject - like Maths - so gets the same teaching time as Maths.

Sore point with dh as a HoD of English

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Just additional explanation for any non-teachers, the bigger class sizes and fewer teaching hours, mean the English teachers teach far more pupils in total over a week: which means more parents' evenings, more reports, and much more marking (and English is one of the more tricky/time-consuming subjects to mark.)

At ds's school (state, non-competitive) they have 25 in all classes expect science, technology, HE and stuff like that, where they have no more than 20. It's so that there aren't as many children at one time in practical classes. I have no idea whether this is typical or not.

at my ds school its average 28kids per lesson, he has 3 english lessons a week for 1 1/4hour each lesson, 3 science lessons and only 2 maths lessons

In scotland science classes are not allowed to be larger than 20