Problem: we have overcrowded classrooms

Classrooms should be many things: busy, inclusive, purposeful, respectful, happy, safe. One thing they shouldn’t be is overcrowded. Trouble is, they are.

The children may all have a seat and may well enjoy the minimum square metreage set out in DfE guidelines (4.1m2 per pupil plus 350m2 in case you were wondering), but learning is not a spreadsheet activity and it doesn’t take place on squared paper. And despite very exciting advances in AI, powerful learning will always happen best in that fissile space between the teacher and the taught. It really is magic when it happens.

The question here is whether a certain and well established ratio of 1 teacher to 30 children catalyses this reaction. Experience says not, and the refrain is as common as it is plaintive: I just can’t meet all their needs. There’s too many of them. Mass education has becomes mass frustration if not straight down mass disappointment.

Let’s start by being honest with ourselves: classrooms are overcrowded not because research indicates that learning hits the sweet spot under such conditions. No, they are overcrowded for two reasons:

a) we are still hardwired into the Victorian education imaginary which sees too many of us still teaching young people in batches of 30, sorted by age, seated in pairs, rows of 10, facing the front

b) there is not enough money in the system to think beyond this and adjust the ratios more favourably

So there we have it: a certain ratio of 1:30.

Just because, as my dad used to say.

Research on class sizes

But what does the research say?

e e f t o o l k i t (enter)

Oh dear.

In the EEF toolkit (the one stop shop for busy school leaders wanting to identify high impact strategies for school transformation), Reducing class sizes apparently delivers only “low impact for very high cost based on very limited evidence” delivering on average 2 months of additional progress over the year. So the evidence (although limited by EEFs own admission) indicates that there is not much point in pursing the idea of smaller class sizes.

But hang on a minute. There is something intuitive about the notion that learning is improved by more favourable adult to child ratios. It may be more costly, for sure, but more impactful? Almost certainly. I mean, how can it not be?

But let’s look again anyway…

e e f t o o l k i t (enter)

Okay. Here we go. A striking contradiction: Small group tuition actually has “moderate impact for low cost based on moderate evidence” delivering on average 4 additional months of progress across the year. So there is actually more evidence of greater impact at less cost when teaching small groups then there is when reducing class sizes.

We will need to talk about money, but before we do, let’s look at how children benefit from learning in smaller groups.

Provocation: towards a Carolean education imaginary

I was listening to a podcast last week where an ex-teacher was being interviewed about his experiences as a deputy head of a Special Educational Needs school. A range of topics were covered but it was the few minutes given over to EHCPs and their impact on provision in specialist settings that really resonated with me.

In doing her pre-interview research, the interviewer admitted that she was surprised to discover that academic provision was only one of a number of areas covered in the plan. Provision was set out to meet a range of social and emotional needs and the views of the child and the family were sought.

This is a big document and it is legally binding. So it stands to reason that in order to meet these highly complex needs, it is common for specialist settings to have high teacher to young person ratios, and to have to adopt an agile, innovative and child-centred approach in order to meet to the needs of the learner. These setting are routinely praised for their creativity, trusted relationships and child-centred approach. I read an inspection report recently for a local special school where the inspector lauded the fact that the school didn’t have one curriculum but one hundred. Extraordinary.

And I am not without personal experience in this field. As an ex-deputy headteacher, I am quite familiar with the EHCP process and as a co-founder of a small alternative provision within our mainstream junior school designed to provide a personalised, Thrive-infused curriculum for children who otherwise would have found themselves on the outside, I have seen the transformational impact of a certain ratio: ideally 1:6, 1:8. While it is demanding, and emotionally and physically draining, it works in all the ways you would expect it to once relationships are established.

My first thought on hearing the podcast was that it would be amazing if all children received an EHCP-type undertaking; a document which captured interests, needs and views in a much more expansive way bound up in a pledge to meet the needs of the whole child. It’s the legal obligation to meet this need which delivers small class sizes. Now you will argue that this is already the case - the teacher standards clearly set out the responsibilities of the class teacher in terms of meet need - but the reality is that to do so for 30 children is in all practical senses impossible.

(I would like to stress that this suggestion of some sort of universal EHCP is in no way intended to undermine the importance of the existing document within current educational best practice. Quite the opposite in fact: the suggestion is to take its ambition and apply it across to mainstream settings for all children. Making it binding would force schools to reduce class sizes to meet need and the impact would be transformational.)

We need a new vision for education; a Carolean education imaginary: costly and probably cost-inefficient, but certainly transformational. A vision to emancipate learners and learning.

Possibility: a personal teaching allowance

Let’s turn our attention to the elephant in the room: money. Stuck in an old education imaginary might be done out of laziness and habit, but the money bit is an undeniable pain point so it needs careful thought. Let others do that careful thinking while we enjoy a provocation:

• The government allocates £7460 per child per year. Let’s, for a moment, think of this as money the child brings into school to spend on their learning.

• Approximately 85% of a school’s budget is allocated to staffing. Let’s reflect this in the per-child allocation which comes down to £6341 for the child to spend on staffing.

• Now not all adults that work with children are teachers, and their on-site education can’t be delivered without these people, so, let’s look at the amount of teaching contact time they have. A typical primary school child will spend 33 hours a week in school. Take out breaks and lunch and they have about 22 hours of teacher contact time - approximately 60%. Within the bounds of this reverie, our child now has a budget of £3804 to spend on their ‘teacher’. Let’s think of it as a personal teaching allowance.

• Turning our attention to the teachers, an M3 teacher (three years in) would cost a school approximately £42,267 and year (including on-costs at about 25%).

• So £42,267 divided by £3803 delivers a ratio of 1:11. Now imagine that!

Can it be that simple? Probably not, but it’s a provocation, not a fiscal statement. My response to those who say it doesn’t work like this is simple: why not?

It may be stating the bleeding obvious, but the takeaway from the research is that whether you are reducing class sizes or delivering a model of small group tution, impact is still dependent on skilful teachers using the reduced numbers to create powerful, bespoke learning that explicitly meets the needs of the youngsters they are working with. This seems perfectly fair enough.

As leaders, we can now turn our attention to finding out how we can create classes to a certain ratio and interrogate very carefully indeed everything that competes for the money, resulting in an erosion of this new personal teaching allowance.