- There is a clear effect of class size differences on children’s academic attainment over the reception year (age 4/5), and there is a clear case for small class sizes during the first year of school for both literacy and maths.
- Small classes (below 25) work best in literacy for children who are most in need academically, that is, those with the lowest school entry scores who have most ground to make up. These findings suggest where targeting of resources (in this case small classes) might be best directed.
- There is what might be called a ‘disruption’ effect when moving into a different sized class from reception to Year 1. This effect was magnified when children moved into a bigger class. The implication seems to be that in addition to smaller classes in the reception year it is advisable to maintain stability into future years.
- Pupils entering school not at the beginning of the school year but later, in the spring or summer term, performed less well than those entering school in the Autumn term. The policy implication of this finding is that staggered entry into school does not favour academically the later, usually Spring term, entrants to school. This is not just to do with their age. To turn this the other way round, in terms of academic progress there appear to be benefits to children of being in the reception year for the whole year.
- There was no clear evidence for any year for either literacy or maths that additional staff or additional adults in the class had an effect on children’s progress in literacy and mathematics and there is no apparent ‘compensation’ effect of having extra adults in the class.
- Class size was related to three main types of classroom processes:
- Within class groups: in larger classes there were larger and more numerous within class groupings. Teachers found with a large class there was often a difficult choice between larger or more numerous groups, and that larger groups could have an adverse effect on the amount and quality of teaching and the quality of pupils’ work and concentration.
- Class size and teaching: we found that class size is related to teaching in three main ways: 1. teacher task time with pupils, 2. teacher support for learning, and 3. classroom management and control. Overall it is proposed that in smaller classes there is more likelihood of what we call TEACHER SUPPORT FOR LEARNING.
- Class size and pupils: we found that in smaller classes there is more active involvement with teacher, in terms of initiating and responding, there was less pupil in-attentiveness and off-task behaviour, especially in terms of being disengaged from allocated work, and children in larger classes spent more time interacting with peers. Social relations between children were not strongly related to class size, but intriguingly, there were signs that relationships between children are WORSE in small classes with under 20 children.
- Theoretically, class size can be considered as one type of classroom environmental contextual factor that will influence teachers and pupils in a number of ways. In contrast to a direct model of educational influence, we argue that it is not entirely the teacher's responsibility, and contextual factors cannot be ignored.
- There is a need in the design of teacher training programmes, both initial and continuing, to consider ways of adjusting productively to contextual features like class size, and an allied need to plan for the effective deployment of teaching assistants and other adults in educational settings.
- Findings from Key Stage 1 are also summarised in a DfES research brief which can be viewed in either PDF or Word format.
- A full, detailed summary of the results can be viewed in a DfES research report in PDF format, or downloaded in Word format.