Fiona Hyslop the Education Secretary in Scotland has announced that Local Authorities are to be given the legal protection they require to limit P1 class sizes to 25 - this is in comparison to the England and Wales legal limit of 30.
The right of children to more time and attention in the classroom and delivery of improved literacy and numeracy in early years are at the centre of the Scottish Government's decision to introduce new regulations, which will allow local authorities to tackle the largest classes and help drive down P1 classes towards 18. The Scottish Government plans to introduce regulations to establish a maximum class size for primary one from the start of the next school year. This is the first time since devolution that legislative action has been taken to limit the number of children in primary one.
Ms Hyslop also announced the Scottish Government is establishing a Class Size Review to examine the variety of rules and regulations governing individual class sizes across primary and secondary levels, and how to make them more coherent, giving consideration as to whether primary legislation is required.
So how many children are in your childs class? do you feel it makes a difference?
My children are lucky to go to a small school - there are about 25 in each class, but I am aware that this causes other issues in terms of the school budget as a bigger proportion of the funding per child needs to go on teachers.
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We were in a lucky situation - when my son started his P1 class in Scotland he had only 25 in the class (I think) - this was when the Scottish Parliament said that Scottish school should have maximum 18 in P1 to P3. Now in P3 he has 31 in his class!!! Unless the Scottish Government puts legal limits on the Local Authorities will continue to ignore the 'guidelines'. Fife Council are making cuts left, right, and centre and of course children's education will suffer. At least the P1 limit is now a 'legal' limit - lets hope they continue to reduce the sizes in the other primary classes.
When we had new parents meeting, the school said they were going to have 26 in the class. Considering this was early May and they'd done their second round of "offering" spare places to those unhappy with their allocation first time, I thought this would be pretty set. But come September and there are 30 children in class - and apparently 4 children were after the last place. So we have 30. For us, in England, that's the infant class size limit. It is one of the reasons I chose this school because all the others were 35 intake and mixed year groups but none of them were particularly clear how they decided who went there. It is less of an issue for my son but for my daughter who will start next year. She is one of the younger ones but is very bright so in a mixed intake, she would possibly be held back just because she is younger.
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