Quality of teachers is more important than quantity of pupils, ministers told

The Scottish Government’s target of a maximum of 18 pupils in P1-3 is “nowhere near enough”, according to one of the UK’s leading experts who labelled part of its stratey as “stupid”.

Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education in London, argues that classes in the first two years of schooling should have no more than 15 pupils.

“If they (the Scottish Government) don’t have enough money to do that, they should just cut class sizes in P1 and P2, rather than P1-3,” he said.

Basing his comments on the Tennessee Star project, which he describes as the “gold standard” of research into class sizes, he argues that the American research showed there was no additional benefit in cutting pupil numbers in the equivalent of P3.

The rationale behind having very small classes in P1 and P2 is that it allows pupils to develop good learning habits, such as socialisation and reading skills, and these gains are maintained in future years.

However, at other stages of children’s education, Professor Wiliam argues that it is far more cost- effective to focus resources on embedding formative assessment.

He suggests that cutting a class of 30 to 20 gives children the equivalent of four extra months of learning per year but the additional costs of teachers’ salaries and school buildings make this a very expensive option of around £20,000 per class, per year.

On the other hand, the implementation of a formative assessment approach could provide eight extra months of educational development for an outlay of only £2,000, he says. This includes the costs of training, supply cover and development. That calculation depends on setting up “teaching learning communities” of groups of 8-10 teachers who meet once a month to share good practice.

Professor Wiliam, who was speaking at the annual Chartered London Teachers Conference this week, said the only caveat in his argument, that reducing class sizes to raise pupil achievement was a waste of money, occurred when pupils were badly behaved.

“Smaller classes do confer a benefit if pupils are unruly, because having fewer pupils in a class means less disruption,” he commented. “But as long as pupils are well-behaved hen what you can do with a class of 20 is generally possible with a class of 30.”

He told The TESS: “If we are willing to pay a bad teacher £25,000, then, rationally, we should be willing to pay an excellent teacher £100,000. Teacher quality trumps almost everything else. What you do when you do reduce class size is dilute teacher quality.”

Training large numbers of teachers to teach smaller classes is not cost-effective, he argues.

The SNP-led Government has pledged to train 20,000 teachers by 2011, but Professor Wiliam describes that strategy as “a stupid way to spend the money”. A further way to raise both teacher quality and pupil attainment would be to reduce teachers’ non-contact time from the current 22.5 hours per week to 15 hours per week, he suggests. This would give teachers more time to prepare and deliver better lessons.

Ronnie Smith, general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, which wants all classes reduced to 20 pupils or fewer, disputed Professor Wiliam’s cost-benefit analysis. He pointed out that the average primary class size in Scotland was now just above 23, and that it would not cost as much as £20,000 per class to cut pupil numbers to 20.

As Scotland operated a standards-based system for teachers, the only way that teacher quality would drop was if the standard had been lowered in recent years – and that was not the case, said Mr Smith.

Source: Times Educational Supplement, UK
http://www.tes.co.uk/2584183