What is the largest class you have taught? KS2

[iHaveACold]

My school is 4 form entry but numbers of pupils are falling so not all classes have 30 children. The school is looking of ways to cut teachers/save money and I have now been told I will have a Year 5 class of 36 in September. Mostly EAL and many have additional needs.

What is the largest class you've had and do you have any tips on how to manage it. I'm going to try and be positive about it and be glad I don't have a class of 40 (as I have heard other schools have).

I had a class of 37 once - my first year of teaching a mixed age class, y5/6.
What saved my bacon was an amazing HLTA (although I don't think she officially was at the time) who took y5 for maths every day. I can't even imagine how I managed the marking, but it was a very long time ago and there was very little SEN in the class, which seems to be a thing of the past, certainly in my school.

I routinely teach 32 - 33.

I have taught 36 (mixed year groups, as an NQT) and 34 (several times, including mixed age groups, as a trainee).

Tbh, I have never found the absolute numbers of children the main issue in terms of driving workload / classroom management. IME it has always been the classes with the widest spread of ability / needs that have generated the greatest amount of stress, and that hasn't necessarily been correlated with absolute numbers.

Those extra books to mark in every set do add up, though, so strategies for self / peer marking are really helpful, especially if - like me - you work in a school where the expectation is that every book is marked between every lesson of the same subject so there can be 4 or 5 sets in a day.

I would also say that simple things like giving out books and sheets and resources - especially as space gets really tight with extra desks - is worth thinking through, however trivial that may seem. In Covid times children have been coming straight in rather than playing outsider before school, and I have found the value of tearly-arriving child labour giving out books and sheets in the morning while the classroom is relatively empty. Having separate drawers / sets of commonly-used resources at the front and back of the classroom - or even more places if appropriate - can also be really useful to minimise children having to move around between closely-packed tables.

All of these are trivial, really - teaching 36 is, after all, just like teaching 30 - but it is those little things that I have found vital in really big classes. My classroom behaviour expectations also go up in bigger classes, and I spend longer establishing routines, not only to keep overall noise down but again because those extra children to add to the list of 'Well done X, you are quiet but Y I am still waiting for you' is cumulatively wearing.

Oh, and if your school has not already gone down the route of e.g. whole class guided reading, Mastery Maths 'the lesson is the lesson'-type initialtives, investigate them. ANYTHING that can be whole class, not requiring 7 sets of differentiated work, will save your sanity!

this is why I'll never leave private education!! I have 12 kids with a full time TA. 36 kids is mad.

toadstool, my hardest work ever class had 16 in it.

Why? Because it had the biggest ability range I have ever had in a single class, ranging from a child with moderate learning difficulties and a significant degree of physical disability, right up to someone working routinely 4 years ahead of their chronological age. Nor were these 'lone outliers' - 38% on the SEN register, 50% PP, and no obvious 'groups of similar ability' within the class, so it was almost child by child planning.

32-33 of with a much more restricted ability range is a walk in the park by comparison.

@cantkeepawayforever fair enough I have different abilities of course but nothing unmanageable.

A spread of at least 10 years in terms of the 'approximate age equivalent at which children were working' in a single class was a) hard and b) luckily unique in my experience. Not unmanageable, but hard!

I started as an NQT in Y5 with 33 and no TA. They were lovely on the whole and it was fine.
Now teaching Year 1 at an independent school. 18 kids and a full time TA. I do feel they get a lot more of my time.

37 of mixed year 5 and 6.

I'll be honest, it was awful. The marking was ridiculous. We got to Christmas then numbers meant we split back into 5 and 6.

We're going to be in the same situation next year here. Currently I've got 23, probably will be 32 next year. We are a very transient school, so that will almost certainly change. The reason we have such low numbers this year is immigrant visas not being extended, so families going home. Covid and Brexit reasons.

I had 39 in a Y6 class once but they were an absolute delight.

I had 32 in Y4 once and it was awful. It would have been easier with a good TA. Unfortunately I had one who was awful (teaching kids maths wrong rather than asking for help and then trying to tell me I was wrong!) 😳 When I tried to address this it wasn’t managed well. If you know the staff in your school try to get a request in early for a TA you work well with. Peer marking as others have suggested will work well too.

@Baws, it has been 8 years since I last taught a KS2 class of less than 32!

I agree that a good TA can be really useful, especially in 'marking / support-heavy' subjects like Maths & English.

@cantkeepawayforever
Really? I’ve been out of primary for longer than that now so wasn’t aware of that! It was a big issue at the time with the parents arranging meetings to oppose there being more than 30 in the class! 😳

Class size regs only apply to KS1.

In KS2 we are limited only by the physical accommodation of the building, as appeals are 'balance of prejudice' and we have to be able to prove, essentially, that the extra children cause a greater problem to us than not being admitted causes to them (we are a school with a VERY large number of appeals every year).

We always run with 32 per class, and some 33s. Of late years we have managed to avoid 34s, but my first class in the school was 34.

33 - thankfully that's the maximum allowed in Scotland, but when I was in P7, we had 42 in each of the 3 classes.