Are our schools too large?

The honest answer is, "not all". There are still some very good and smaller schools - the so called public (meaning private) schools tend to be smaller than our giant comprehensives.

In essence, unless arrangements are put into place, a large school is more likely to to let any who are reluctant students to slip through school with minimum effort. It is difficult to keep track of them and to provide them with the individual treatment required to stimulate any interest, and any who wish to bunk off and spend a pleasant day in the town with their friends will find it easier in a school so large that nobody knows all students.

In a recent blog about non-working parents, I repeated what many others have said, that children of parents living entirely on benefit are likely in turn to be themselves parents on benefit. There is no sense of pride, no ambition to succeed, no career to aspire to. Instead there is drift, and a drift about which a very large school is likely to be able to do little.

The difficulty is, as we saw, that in an average school 20% will be from such backgrounds. At school, even if they avoid disturbance in class, their lack of interest and inclination to study must have some effect on the remaining students, and they in turn may under-achieve.

Arrangements have been put into place, principally dividing a 2000 student school into two or three schools on the same site. The aim is to make the size more human-friendly, a smaller scale to which everyone can relate. There have also been attempts to maintain an academic orientated stream or streams, where any problem pupils are not involved, in the hope that more able students will be able to develop to their full potential.

So with schools cut horizontally by age groups and vertically by ability, is it really any longer a single school? Apart from sharing good quality sporting, musical and other facilities, is there any reason, except dogma which insists that they be on the same site?

Human beings are daunted by the scale of the super-comprehensives. They feel insignificant in comparison with the huge buildings and teeming people, and the fact that they barely know all the hundreds in their own part of the school, never mind the other parts.

The Volvo car company discovered many years ago that even without a production line and full division of labour, if workers in their small groups know, trust and look after their group interest, there is no loss in productivity. We are at our best when we relate with people of similar interest and being alongside. We are suspicious of, mistrust, less caring about, other groups. The other groups in the case of a "supercomp" are most of the school.