Page 23 - ELG1709 Agu-Sep Issue 450

COMMENT .

Don’t worry, size doesn’t matter

Parents who think good-quality teaching comes by paying over the odds
for small class sizes are misguided, says Melanie Butler.

ou can have it cheaper, you can cent in Ireland and as low as €8 an hour in And 42 per cent of schools had teachers
have it better, or you can have it parts of Spain. without a first degree, although non-graduate
faster’ – the old adage goes. ‘Pick As levels of graduate unemployment have teachers are correlated with lower learning
‘Ytwo.’ dropped in English-speaking countries, so has outcomes across the OECD. Almost all the
Yet when agents ask parents to pick the the supply of cheap native-speaker graduates. summer schools we examined seemed to
things they want in a classroom, they get the Schools have responded by dropping the employ non-native speakers, who typically
answer: ‘cheaper with smaller classes’ – with level of teacher qualifications they require. were rather better at teaching than their
the proviso: ‘the teacher can be any old Alternatively, they have flown in qualified, inexperienced native-speaker peers,
native speaker as long as they are white.’ according to British Council inspectors’
Let’s start with cheaper. The problem In nearly a decade reports.
is that the biggest fixed cost in any form Parents have kept the smaller classes
of education or training is teachers, who of looking, they demand but, at least in the English-
typically account for 50 per cent of turnover. we have found no speaking world, they have not got them any
There is one very simple way to cut costs cheaper. As teaching costs have dropped, the
without cutting teacher quality, and that is to correlation between agents’ commission has risen to between 30
increase class size. and 40 per cent of all student fees, leaving
But, at least outside Asia, parents and class size and many schools one bad summer away from
agents are convinced that class size is critical. school quality in UK bankruptcy.
Schools compete on how small their classes Is the learning better, or faster? Almost
are. And in private language schools that language schools certainly not, if educational research is to be
can be very small indeed; twelve to a class is believed.
normal, eight not unusual and some schools Take the work of John Hattie of the
boast a maximum class size of four. white non-native speakers from countries University of Melbourne, highlighted in a
The only way to run tiny classes cheaply where they cost less, and hope that students recent article in The Economist magazine. He
is to slash teaching costs. And that is what don’t notice. has crunched the results of more than 65,000
many schools in the West have done. They A recent Gazette investigation into research papers on the effects of hundreds of
have dumped their permanent staff in favour a sample of fifty accredited UK schools interventions on the learning of 250 million
of casual teachers on zero-hour contracts revealed that nearly 60 per cent had at least pupils. He found that aspects of schools
or given them bogus self-employed status. one teacher who did not meet the basic that parents care about a lot, such as class
Hourly rates of pay have plummeted since British Council qualifications requirements of sizes, make little or no difference to whether
the financial crash – they are down 30 per a first degree and a certificate. children learn.
22 August/September 2017

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