Why cutting class sizes has little effect on standards

CLASS size has little impact on a child’s quality of education, a leading expert has claimed, after discovering that teachers do not vary their approach depending on the number of students.

Britain has some of the biggest class sizes in the developed world and there are concerns that children’s education is being hampered as a result.

However, John Hattie, a professor of the University of Melbourne, found new evidence that reducing class of a class had a “very small” effect on the quality of teaching.

The research, commissioned by Pearson Education, looked at 113 studies in developed nations including the UK, the US and Europe over the past 25 years.

It found that reducing the number of pupils in the classroom added four months of teaching per year, while focusing on getting a teacher with the best expertise added two years for every year of teaching.

In his paper, entitled, What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction, Prof Hattie writes: “Reducing class sizes is an innovation that certainly appeases parents, teachers and school leaders”. However, he told the The Daily Telegraph that while the measure does increase achievement, “the effect is very small”.

“The change is small because teachers don’t change their teaching when the size changes,” he said. “Class size has not mattered up to now. That’s a lot of money to spend on extra teachers and extra classrooms for very little gain.

He said, however, that in Britain, schools were incentivised to lower the ratio between teacher and student because that is a way to obtain extra funds. “That’s a crazy incentive to argue for lower class sizes,” he added. “It would be great if the kid got more attention, but it turns out that’s not true.”

Separately, Prof Hattie’s research found that the classroom a student is assigned to within a school matters more than the school itself.

Based on 662 studies, which sampled the equivalent of around three million studies, the data showed that the difference between choosing either a private or a state school added only one month of teaching per year.

However, if the choice was between teachers within the school, the quality of the teaching can add almost two years per year to a child’s education.

Professor Hattie said: “For two kids of the same ability it almost doesn’t matter which school they go to, but it matters who teaches them.”