13th January 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The week the government announced that they were considering requests to raise the limit on infant class sizes to over 30. The talks came after government figures were released suggesting that £450,000 extra places for children will be required in England by 2015, with a baby boom putting intense pressure on schools.
In 1998, Labour limited class sizes for 5-7 year olds to 30 pupils, but some overstretched councils in london recently circulated a document which asks for this limit to be raised to up to 32 children. This comes after Sefton council spent a quarter of a million pounds so that classes with 31 pupils could have 2 teachers.
Liberal Democrat councillor Simon Shaw, argued that that it was common sense to allow schools to raise the limit to 32 students, if it avoided huge expenditure for just one extra pupil. However, critics rightly point out that even 30 students is a very large class size, and viewing the extra expense as wasted on ‘one student’ is nonsense. Allowing councils to raise classes sizes by 2 may solve what is viewed as a bureaucratic problem, but it won’t solve the fact that we simply aren’t investing enough in education.