New £36m fund to cut infant class sizes
ANEW £36m fund to reduce infant class sizes and raise standards will be announced by the Education Secretary Kirsty Williams today.
It will target classes, starting with the largest ones, where teaching and learning need to improve and where there are high levels of deprivation.
The money, consisting of revenue and capital funding, will be invested over the next four years up until 2021.
The latest figures show that 7.6% (8,196) of infant school pupils in Wales were in classes of more than 30.
Ms Williams said: “Our national mission is to raise standards and extend opportunities for all our young people.
“Time and time again parents and teachers tell me that they are concerned about class sizes. We have listened to these concerns, looked at the international evidence and are today announcing a new £36m fund to address infant class sizes.
“There is a positive connection between smaller classes and attainment, particularly for pupils from poorer backgrounds. This is most significant for younger children, which is why we are targeting this investment at infant class sizes.
“This announcement, linked to our other reforms, will create the space for teachers to teach and for pupils to learn.”
Last summer the National Union of Teachers (NUT) Cymru backed plans to reduce school class sizes after figures revealed a marked rise in the number of infant classes in Wales with 31 pupils.
The union said reducing the number of pupils per class would lessen the workload for teachers and improve the quality and quantity of time spent with pupils.
Data published earlier this year showed there were 255 large infant classes in Wales – defined as having 31 or more pupils – in January 2016, up from 246 a year earlier.
Figures compiled by the Welsh Government showed there were 8,196 pupils in large classes in 2016 (7.6% of all infant pupils), compared to 7,835 pupils (7.3%) in similarsized classes in 2015.
The number of pupils aged between four and seven in large classes was as low as 6,969 (6.6%) in 2013.
According to the annual school census, Cardiff has some of the most crowded classes, with an average of 27 pupils per class in city primary schools – one more than the all-Wales average.
The average number of pupils per class in primary schools has risen in Cardiff and Wales since 2010-11, when they were 26 and 25 respectively.
Ms Williams has long believed that reducing class sizes would help raise pupil attainment.
The Welsh Liberal Democrat Assembly manifesto pledged to spend £42m reducing Reception, Year One and Year Two class sizes to fewer than 25 pupils – and the policy was a key strand of the party’s postelection deal with Welsh Labour.
IT’s that time of year when parents will have chosen, or be choosing, primary, secondary and school nursery places for their children.
Those who are further down the line will have watched, and perhaps helped, their teenagers pick universities and colleges for higher education through Ucas.
Choosing somewhere to study is one of the hardest but most important things anyone, or any parent, will do.
How do you know if the places you are looking at are right for you and your child and how much attention should be paid to the myriad statistics out there?
A report out last week said education policymakers in Wales must stop obsessing over performance indicators and school colour coding performance tables should be ended.
It said teachers and schools are overloaded with statistics from our own inspection body Estyn to the international Pisa tests and all the numbers and figures collected in between that aim to measure performance.
The report “After Pisa: A way forward for education in Wales?” comes after Wales’ schools system was ranked the worst in the UK in the international Pisa tests published in December.
But, as parents, we are bound to look at the data. It is there. It is easily available and it does tell part, if not all, of the education story.
Who, after all, would want their children to go to a school, college or university with poor exam results if they had a choice?
As parents in Wales we have three options on schools (more if you can afford to go private) – the local school, Welsh-medium, or church school.
One of the first things we may do when choosing is ask friends their experiences and scour inspection reports and data online.
Both may only tell part of the truth and every child and school is different – but what else are we to do?
Ask a child or parent their opinion about any school and you are likely to get six different views for every six people you ask.
What suits one person may not suit another and peer groups as well as individual teachers, head teachers and friends have a vast impact on anyone’s performance and experience in the classroom.
Data showing exam results are relatively low may not mean your, or anyone else’s, child will necessarily do badly. Equally shining results scores will not turn every pupil into an A* student. Yet these statistics are an indicator and are hugely compelling for families, especially when starting the school journey when your last experience of the classroom and exams was years ago.
Visiting a school gives a wider perspective than data alone. You can usually get a feel for a place from walking through the door and feeling the general atmosphere.
Talking to pupils, students, teachers and lecturers at open days is a very good way of getting an impression about a school, college or university.
Visiting primary and high schools for my children many years ago I was shocked at one high school, which ranked very highly, to hear a French teacher tell another French teacher that she was tired and wished she was somewhere else.
It wasn’t so much that the sentiment wasn’t the most professional, given that she was in a classroom with parents milling around, but more that she assumed (wrongly) none would understand because she was speaking in French.
It wasn’t a school I had been considering – I was accompanying a friend – but I never quite got rid of the feeling that I didn’t like it. Again, as with the data and statistics that only tell one story, it was unfair to judge the entire school on that one teacher’s comment and attitude.
Last November hundreds of former pupils and colleagues paid glowing tributes to a popular teacher from Pengam who had died.
Cyril Thomas, former assistant head teacher of Lewis Boys School in Pengam, was described as “a legend and an inspiration” who never gave up on any pupil in hundreds of comments posted to the school’s Facebook site.
Four-hundred people attended the funeral of Mr Thomas, who trained as a teacher after leaving the mines. He worked at Lewis Boys in the 1980s and 1990s and was remembered fondly decades on as someone who had a positive impact on those he taught and worked with.
One former pupil wrote on Facebook: “I wouldn’t be the person I am today without you sir. An absolute legend who gave everyone a fair crack of the whip, even the boys constantly flirting with trouble like myself.”
It is teachers like these, and schools which nurture them, that are impossible to find in black and white in any of the data. They are faceless in those numbers and figures but it is these type of teachers who make a difference to education.
You may hear echoes of them in results which are A*s or Ds. There are pupils who are not A* candidates who go on to be successful and A* candidates who do not.
We imagine, staring into the statistics, that we are looking into a crystal ball that will accurately predict future results for our children.
Sadly no-one, not even number crunchers, can do that. Data is an indicator. Data has a place and should be considered but it is not everything when chooosing an education, or anything else in life.