Class size: how small is small enough?

Class size

How small is good enough? There is no consensus anywhere on the ideal ratio or class size.

Currently here in Singapore, the average primary school class has about 30+ students.

Let's say we halve the size of the class. This means the number of teachers will have to be doubled. Similarly the number of classrooms will have to be doubled.

Currently, there are more than 15000 primary school teachers according to Education Statistics Digest from MOE.

To double the number of primary school teachers means hiring another 15,000+ teachers.

It goes without saying that there will be trade-off in teacher quality when numbers are ramped up significantly.

And where will you find another 15,000+ new teachers to hire? There are finite manpower resources and competing demands in other sectors as birth rates fall and smaller cohorts enter the workforce.

Will teachers still be paid the same salary?

With double the number of teachers, cost of salaries will double also. There will be less money for other developments - professional development, special programmes, student development etc.

What about the physical space?

Doubling the number of classrooms means building more primary schools. There are currently 177 primary schools. How many more primary schools must be built? Another 177 primary schools? Or will every existing classroom be divided into 2 and children put into smaller rooms with less space to move around?

It is better to have a quality teacher teaching a bigger class than 2 lousy teachers teaching 2 small classes.

The education system is never better than the quality of its teachers.

In other words, an education system is as good as the quality of its teachers.

It is easy to make a proposal. A politician must imagine himself implementing his own proposal.

The OECD which has studied many education systems concluded that reducing class size is not, on its own, a sufficient guarantee to improve the quality of education systems. Increasing the quality of teaching is often a more efficient policy lever to improve student performance than reducing class size.

This is not to say that class size does not matter.

It does and this is why our class size has been reduced over the years. It used to be 40+ per class.

Class sizes also vary based on subject and students' learning needs.

For example, classes for weaker students in the Learning Support Programme and Dyslexia Remediation Programme are conducted in classes of 8 to 10, and four to six respectively.

Primary 1 and 2 pupils have smaller classes so that they can better ease into formal schooling from pre-school education.

We look for an optimum class size that benefits students according to their needs, not a big or small class size.