Class size has 'little influence' on the quality of teaching, expert says

Class size has very little impact on a child’s quality of education, because teachers tend to stick to their teaching approach regardless of the number of students, a new study has found. The research follows concerns that the UK has some of the biggest class sizes in the developed world and that as a result, children’s education is being hampered.

However, Professor John Hattie, Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, has found new evidence that reducing class size has a “very small” effect on the quality of teaching.

To come to this conclusion, Professor Hattie considered the evidence from a total of 113 studies in developed nations – including the UK, the US and Europe – over the last 25 years.

It revealed that lowering the number of pupils in the classroom adds about four months of teaching per year, whilst focusing on getting a teacher with the best expertise adds about two years for every year of teaching.

In his paper, entitled, “What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction”, Professor Hattie wrote: “Reducing class sizes is an innovation that certainly appeases parents, teachers and school leaders. Parents see reducing class size as a proxy to more attention being paid to their children.

“School leaders see it as a proxy for more resources… and teachers argue it is less stressful and more effective to deal with fewer students.”

However, speaking with the Daily Telegraph, Professor Hattie said lowering class sizes “does increase achievement but the effect is very small”.

He added: “The change is small because teachers don’t change their teaching when the size changes. 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 the UK schools were incentivised to lower the ratio between teacher and student because that is a way to get 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, Professor Hattie’s research also 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 students, the data showed the difference between choosing either a private or a state school adds only one month of teaching per year. However, if the choice is between teachers within the school, the quality of the teaching can add almost two years per year to a child’s education.

His research was published by Pearson as part of their “Open Ideas” series, in which independent experts from around the world provide their views on the big, unanswered questions in education.

Source: telegraph.co.uk