Class Size - question

[LifeIz]

My child's school says the class size is 20, however the first week back his PE class size was 47 with one teacher, English 30, Maths 29, Science 31, Geography 35, Spanish 30 (the classroom is too small, students have to get extra tables and chairs), Psychology 29 (classes are in a meeting room for 15 people). Recent OFSTED report in July 2017 mentioned how small the class sizes were.

State or private?
What year group?
How many in whole year, and how many per tutor group?
Set or not set (eg our school top loads higher sets for maths)

Expecting 20 seems a very low number unless you are private.

PE and Geography both seem large, PE unreasonably so. The rest all sound fairly standard to me in what I presume is a state secondary. I'm also assuming you're in England as you mentioned Ofsted. What year group is your son in and does the school set? Top sets with fewer than 30 students in are pretty unusual in most state schools in my experience.
If this is private and you're paying through the nose because they advertised that they had small classes of 20 then I think you have got every right to be annoyed about it though.

It is a state school, in my experience I understand normally top set classes are large, however the schools advertising pitch is based on the small class sizes, the class sizes are only small in year 7.

1812 - in the school, it seems to be bottom heavy with:
year 7 - 580
year 8 - 412
year 9 - 400
year 10 - 200

(I do not have any further information).
My child is in year 9 - 29 in each tutor group.

The school tells parents that there are no sets .
But the students know what sets they are in, due to being told by rouge teachers .

No state school would be able to keep classes that small across the whole school. They've obviously chosen to prioritise small classes in year 7. In my school it's Maths and English that get the smaller class sizes from years 7-11 and pretty much everything else is in classes of 29-32. GCSE option classes vary a bit more depending on what happens to be popular that year. I've known gcse groups as small as 10 and as large as 32. Smaller classes are expensive. We have 6 classes of around 30 in each year group x 5 year groups. If they are always taught in classes of 30 you need 30 teachers teaching at any one time. If they are always in classes of 20 you need 45 teachers teaching at any one time. I understand that you're disappointed that you aren't getting what you thought you were, especially as the school clearly use it as part of their advertising pitch but staffing is the biggest expense in a school and I think you were a bit naive to think that any state school could afford approximately 50% more teaching staff than all the rest. If they are spending more money on staffing year 7 then they have to be clawing that money back somewhere else.

when was the information that the class sizes were small. there have been lots of cuts in the last few months, many schools had to take the decision at the end of the summer to decrease staff numbers and run fewer larger classes this year.

The science class may be too large to be legal for a lab.

sorry, that should say fewer, larger classes.

DS was taught maths (so core subject) in a class for 60 for much of last year. The school decided they needed to focus on GCSE students so took a teacher away from his year group and merged 2 classes together.

I suspect larger classes are going to get even more common as funding cuts bite.

With a bigger intake they'll have less classrooms and staff available, plus funding cuts.

That's a 19 form intake in Y7!!! Has it merged with another school? Seems very odd numbers on roll throughout the school. Masses of new housing? I would not like so many Y7s. Yes, schools work on 30 in a class. 20 is not sustainable.

Not sure when they made the decision to increase the class sizes. There were lots of staff cuts last year. The information about the small class sizes is on the schools website and is in the recent OFSTED - July 2017. I am slightly bemused at the fact that the school state it is their policy to keep class sizes to 20 .

I would be bemused too. Where are all the buildings for 19 forms of entry if this is sustained? 200 in y10 (no Y11?) is, in their eyes, 10 forms of entry. In any other school it is 7 slightly smaller classes of 28/29. Is this a new free school with some marketing whiz running it? The whole numbers on roll scenario sounds odd to me. Personally I would avoid. Are they really saying 580 children is 29 forms of entry? It must be some sort of jungle!

Do the numbers even add up. 200 in year 10 indicates the school is sized for 1000 pupils. But when 580 feed through the 5 year groups it will be triple that number.

So I agree with BubblesBuddy, where the hell are all the buildings coming for the school to triple in size?

There is year 11, 12 and 13 but I do not have the numbers for these. It is not a new school.

This is a massive school OP; the biggest school in my county has 2200 students but this must be bigger.

I don't really understand why there are almost 3 x as many students in yr 7 as yr 10 - has the PAN changed? Or were they running at 1/3 numbers? (unlikely).

Anyway if they boast of classes of 20 then you could ask them about it. But I agree with others, apart from PE (which is ridiculous) and maybe geography, those classes are standard in state education.

Just had a thought - PE at my DC's school is timetabled so 3 classes do it at once. so that's about 90 children and they then split into boys and girls with a teacher each - so I would imagine that the DC are being taught PE in similar size groups to OP's DC.

That many kids in each of those subjects sounds about what I would expect. I can't comment on why they say 20 when you usually find it's about 30 (except the large PE class).

That is horrendously large but I don't see what you can do about itz