Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: Promises, promises – 66 days to the next election
As you will all remember, in the run up to the 1997 election the Labour party published a list of five promises. One of these was that no primary school child aged 5 to 7 would ever be taught in a class of more than thirty. Now, history, albeit in a watered down fashion, repeats itself. Mr Miliband is telling us that if his party were to win the next election no primary school child aged 5 to 7 would be taught in a class of more than thirty for more than a year.
The new proposal is clearly impractical. A school admits thirty-one 5 year olds. Nobody leaves. Is one of these children to be kicked out when they move up a year?
In recent years, politicians of all parties have, to varying degrees, committed themselves to the notion of school autonomy. They have all beaten their chests in shame at the extent to which Whitehall has tried to manage the day-to-day business of education in schools across the country.
Here we have the Labour party betraying its true centralist credentials. The only person who should decide how many children there should be in the classes of the school for which they are responsible is the school’s headteacher. Who else, for example, is in a position to decide whether it is best to have a class of thirty-five with a couple of classroom assistants or a class of twenty-five with no assistants?
We might ask, too, though we all know the answer, why Miliband has homed in on this issue of class size. He has raised it because he knows that it is a concern of so many parents. He thinks it will grab the attention of the electorate and deliver votes. So much for the ‘evidence-based policy’ which is now meant to inform the decisions politicians take on what they want our schools to do and achieve. The truth is that what matters most in a classroom is not the number of pupils, but the quality of the teaching.
This fact has emerged time and time again from the inspection evidence and it really does little more than confirm common sense. A poor teacher who cannot control their children is going to fail in a class of twenty. A good teacher is going to succeed with a class of forty. I am not recommending the latter, because I recognise the equally obvious fact that the larger the size of the class the greater the workload for the teacher in terms of preparation and marking.
Classes can, in fact, be too small. Children learn from each other and there are classes I have watched in independent schools which are too small for this kind of crucially important interaction to take place to any helpful extent.
What is it, sixty-six days to the next election? They bemoan our cynicism and they trot out these pledges. What else do they expect?
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.