From the Guardian today:
English primary schools cutting teacher numbers amid budget pressure, survey finds. A survey of more than 1,000 school leaders and teachers by the National Foundation for Educational Research found that three-quarters said their primary schools were cutting teaching assistant roles, while a third were also cutting teacher numbers.
From GOV.UK in November 2023, pupil-teacher ratios:
Any class-teachers out these will be shouting things like ‘I’ve got 30’ and ‘I’ve never had fewer than 25’, and so on. That’s because the above ratios take into account promoted staff with no or reduced class-contact times, so in Scotland, taking account of wee villages schools in the mix, the average will be in the 20-30 range. In England, the far worse ratio must already mean bigger classes on average.
There is, in England, only a maximum for 5-7 year-olds. Beyond that age group, no legal maximum applies in England.
In Scotland, there is a legal maximum of 33 for Primaries 4 to 7.
So, where are we going in larger, poorer, urban primary schools in England? 40 to 1? More? The Tories would not care. Labour will stick to the Tory spending plans.
Source:
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Such careful data analysis is of no interest to the teacher unions or the media. Theirs is an analysis based on a sample of 1. They find a teacher whose roll is 30, ergo all classes are 30.
And they all assault the teacher.
Alasdair Macdonald.
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What do you mean “pre-War class sizes”? Which war?
I went to Primary School in Scotland in the 1950s – post War. Throughout that period I was in classes of 45 or more. There were 3 primary classes in each year – 6A, 6B, 6C each of a similar size so total year group of around 135. Should imagine England & Wales were much the same.
So again – which war?
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I started primary school in 1953 and the class I was in had 45 children. The numbers fluctuated and reached 52 at one time. By 1960, it had dropped to 30, but that was due to the fact that many children from our area of Glasgow had been rehoused in the new scheme of Drumchapel.
Yours, too, must have been a very large primary school. Our total roll reached 1000 at one time.
So, I guess the war was one of the colonial ones such as in Aden or Malaya!
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