Parents believe they know best, despite statistics

ANALYSIS

Few parents with children in classes of more than 30 pupils believe that class size has no effect on academic achievement. Whatever the statistics say, common sense dictates that five more books to mark each night, five more sets of records to keep, five more children to notice, puts teachers under stress. And teacher stress will rebound on pupils.

Fee-paying schools are in no doubt that this is so. Asked earlier this year why they did not increase class sizes and reduce fees, they replied that smaller classes meant better education because teachers had more time for individual pupils. They were one of the main selling points used by the private sector to attract pupils from state schools.

Class sizes in state schools have risen steadily over the last five years and more than a million primary school children are in classes of more than 30 and 11,000 in classes of more than 40. Only Turkey and Ireland among Western countries have higher pupil-teacher ratios, and only the British and Australian governments have failed to address the issue.

Last year's public spending cuts and the loss of thousands of teachers' jobs turned class size into a contentious political issue. The belief that class size matters is at the heart of the middle-England revolt of parents and governors.

Are they wrong? The Ofsted report is not a piece of research. It is a statistical exercise. Its finding that five to seven-year-olds benefit from smaller classes is backed by the Tennessee research project There is no research comparable to the Tennessee project for older pupils.

Chris Woodhead, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, said yesterday that he was not suggesting that class sizes should rise "add infinitum" but he declined to put a figure on the right limit. It depended, he said, on the type and age of children: an admission that class size does count.

Nor did the survey examine the question of whether teachers, good, bad or indifferent, would teach better if classes were smaller.

The report found that teaching quality, not class size, was the main influence on standards. Self-evidently, teaching standards are important. Smaller classes should not be seen as a panacea. They are expensive and there has to be a debate about how funds available for education are best spent.

The difficulty for parents and politicians is that extra children in a class are tangible. Better teachers are not. The inspectors are right to ask whether public money would be better spent on improving teacher training, more classroom assistants or helping existing teachers improve. There may also be a case for spending more on nursery education. They have not, however, actually proved that any of these would offer better value for money.

If ministers hope that the report will lay to rest the controversy over class size they are mistaken. For years, researchers in this country argued that children in larger classes did better than those in smaller ones. Now they are saying that there is no clear link between class size and achievement and that the youngest children should be in smaller classes. Can parents be blamed for thinking that they and not the researchers know best?