Politics
Cut class sizes to 20 in poor areas
Published 04 December 2000
NS/Fabian Society Second-Term Agenda - Cut class sizes to 20 in poor areas. By Joe Hallgarten and Gavin Kelly of the IPPR
The left is apt to believe that high spending on public services always delivers the greatest benefits to the poor. All too often, this is not the case. A second-term Labour government should try to build redistribution into its core spending programmes - and there could be no better place to start than the schools.
Even today, there are few better indicators of children's future earnings than whether or not they qualify for free school meals at the age of 11. This government has launched a torrent of initiatives designed to break the link between poverty and educational underachievement. But if Labour is to get to the heart of educational disadvantage, it must grapple with school funding - a beast of a political issue, not only because of its complexity, but also because any change will create (relative) losers.
Although the government's formula for allocating funds does give more to education authorities that have high levels of deprivation, it simply isn't enough. Some may argue that all we need to do is improve the formula - by increasing the extra money that a school gets for every child on free school meals. But the latest research is conclusive: disadvantaged children will benefit most from greatly reduced class sizes. On this issue, central government ought to be prescriptive.
At the 1997 election, new Labour pro-mised to cut all infant class sizes to 30. Now there are calls to extend this prescription to seven- to 11-year-olds.
Yet there is scant evidence from the UK or elsewhere to show that attainment has improved in any way at schools where class sizes have been reduced from the mid-30s to 30. Many of the schools with large classes are in middle-class areas; they are already doing well. To set a blanket target of the sort that Labour set at the last election runs the risk of redistributing resources to leafy areas.
It is now a commonplace on both left and right that research has failed to show any connection between smaller classes and better results. But we should read the small print of the research. First, it shows that smaller classes do improve results - but only where there are dramatic reductions in pupil numbers to between 15 and 20. Second, smaller classes do not benefit all pupils equally; they help those from disadvantaged backgrounds most. The most comprehensive UK study to date, by London University's Institute of Education, has shown a clear correlation between significant drops in class size and attainment by low-achievers. The researchers concluded that "a drop in class size from 25 to 15 leads to a gain in literacy of about one year's achievement for the bottom 25 per cent, and about five months for the rest".
Experiments in the US back this conclusion. In Tennessee, 79 primary schools had their class sizes reduced from 22-26 to 13-17. The result was a boost, for all pupils, in their test scores; but the ethnic minority pupils did twice as well as the average. Other US states, encouraged by these results, have tried major cuts in class sizes for schools in disadvantaged areas. Wisconsin, for example, has found that, in schools with classes of 15-20, pupils significantly outperform their contemporaries in other state schools.
The implications are clear. Labour should resist any calls for an across-the- board extension of the class size commitment it made in 1997, just as it should dispute the claim that, because there is no clear benefit from cutting class sizes from 34 to 30, class size reductions never make any difference at all.
So, a second-term Labour government should cut average class sizes to 20 in primary schools where a high proportion of children are eligible for free school meals. At the very least, it should start pilot experiments for pupils at disadvantaged schools.
Such a policy could have several desirable effects. First, it could encourage the best teachers to work in the most deprived areas. Many teachers want to improve the life chances of those in most need, but are often frustrated by the sheer scale of the task. As one head, faced with the desertion of a cluster of his senior staff, said: "These teachers are not leaving to earn more money - all they are looking for is a place where the job is not impossible."
Second, the guarantee of dramatically reduced class sizes might inhibit metropolitan middle-class families from hunting around for schools in posh areas. If schools then had a more even social mix, this would reinforce the positive effects of smaller classes - research shows that children from less affluent families do better if they mix with peers from more prosperous homes.
Finally, just as the 1997 pledge provided a powerful statement of the government's intent to redress decades of underinvestment in education, a promise to cut class sizes in deprived areas would show ministers' determination to use public services as a vehicle for redistribution. Since the welfare state was created, the poor have always received the poorest-quality services. Bringing this pattern to an end should be the overarching ambition of new Labour's public service modernisation.
If the Prime Minister's notion of "equality of worth" is to become a reality, children who receive free school meals should have the same life chances as those who attend fee-paying schools. More money alone for state schools cannot achieve that. But a pledge to ensure that the children of Hackney or West Bromwich are educated in classes no larger than their fee-paying counterparts in Harrow or Rugby would be a step in the right direction. One class size should not fit all.
The writers are research fellows at the Institute for Public Policy Research. This is the first in a series of articles, prepared by the NS and the Fabian Society, on ideas for a second Labour term
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