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April 30, 2004
Education, education, education
It's one thing to meet a target, and quite a different matter altogether to maintain the standard, something the Secretary of State for Education is now discovering. Labour was elected in 1997 with a manifesto promise that class sizes for 5, 6 and 7 year olds would be no bigger than 30 pupils, this target to be attained by 2002. In what is now becoming an increasingly rare display of competance, the target was met.Since then according to the DfES the situation has worsened, with more than 23,000 pupils being taught in groups of 30 or more, an increase of nearly 6,000 over the previous year, a situation exacerbated by the loos of 800 primary teachers.
"But hey" I hear you say, "the Government keeps going on about the increasing numbers of teachers. Are they lying?". Well the answer to that is no and yes. Last year the number of teachers did rise by 4,200 to nearly 428,000, but of the rise only 1,800 were extra qualified teachers, with the balance of 2,400 due to working trainees and overseas staff.
Furthermore, the DfES claims that only 38 classes broke the rules, as the others had been allowed to exceed the 30-pupil ceiling for a variety of reasons. However from my experience, I have seen a number of fiddles whereby the real class size is being disguised, by placing children on the register for a different class for example. So I suspect that the real scale of the issue is greater than the DfES reports. The bottom line is that the Government has used the demographic changes leading to falling rolls not as an opportunity to reduce class sizes, but instead as a way of making cost savings by reducing teacher numbers. Not the best way to improve standards in primary education.
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Posted by Clive on April 30, 2004 4:55 PM in the category Old Stuff