First primary school allocation worry

silvercar

pigpen wrote: »

Had you read my other posts you would see there is more than 1 teacher in each class and it is perfectly normal for a classroom assistant to take a group of 6 or 7 children to complete a task set by the teacher.

That just increases their friendship circle.. they were in nursery in just this manner it is perfectly normal to them it is only a small number of parents who get hysterical over it.. the children take everything in their stride and get on with learning.. like I said, some parents just like having something to moan about, even when their children are doing well!! ... it is uniforms that set me off

Having known someone whose kids went through this sort of school, she said all her children had a lot of anxiety when the new classes were announced, worries over whether any of their close friends would be with them or not. Also educationally, any year 5/6 mixed class is going to have more attention given to the year 6 children than the year 5.

I don't see how you have more than 1 teacher per class if the whole point of mixed classes is because you don't have 30 children in each year group. If you have sufficient teachers you would be better off having one year group per smaller class.

Spendless

silvercar wrote: »

Having known someone whose kids went through this sort of school, she said all her children had a lot of anxiety when the new classes were announced, worries over whether any of their close friends would be with them or not. Also educationally, any year 5/6 mixed class is going to have more attention given to the year 6 children than the year 5.

I don't see how you have more than 1 teacher per class if the whole point of mixed classes is because you don't have 30 children in each year group. If you have sufficient teachers you would be better off having one year group per smaller class.

My 2 kids went to Infant and Junior schools where there were at least 2 and sometimes 3 classes per year. Each year the class was mixed up. I preferred it, it taught the kids to make different friends well before the automatic mixing would come once they reached Secondary school age and wouldn't be with (roughly) the same 29 kids they'd been with since they were 4.

The schools mine attended usually had a TA as well as a Teacher. Unsure if this is common or not throughout U.K? Very easy to have different children working on different papers/levels throughout a classroom. That's common even within the same year group, that different children are given different level papers based on ability. This has also happened at Secondary school.

Former_MSE_Andrea

msb5262 wrote: »

Just sent the following:
I would like to report this thread or post because I can't believe MSE picked up such a racist OP to start off a thread about school places! Please reconsider and remove this.

Hi, I totally hold my hands up, I missed that comment when I picked the thread. I've removed it. Thanks for letting us know.

sheramber

I went to a school in a rural area. Three years in the same class. This is normal in schools where the number of pupils is small.

We still reached our potential. We made friends with different ages of children not just our own age.

We had one teacher and no class assistants as they were non existent in those days.

There was no difference when we went to secondary school and mixed with pupils who had attended larger schools with one year to a class.

My neighbour's children went to the local primary school with two classes, then secondary school with a total of 68 pupils over 6 years.

Both are now at University.

balletshoes

silvercar wrote: »

Having known someone whose kids went through this sort of school, she said all her children had a lot of anxiety when the new classes were announced, worries over whether any of their close friends would be with them or not. Also educationally, any year 5/6 mixed class is going to have more attention given to the year 6 children than the year 5.

I don't see how you have more than 1 teacher per class if the whole point of mixed classes is because you don't have 30 children in each year group. If you have sufficient teachers you would be better off having one year group per smaller class.

I am that someone - my daughter was in a split class in year 1 (with year 2s) and then again in year 5 (with year 6s). She was one of the youngest in her year, and she thrived in the split classes. The split classes in our school were split roughly half of one year and half of another, and there were 3 classes over the 2 composite years. Yes, she did go into these split classes not having her best friends in them, but she's a fairly sociable child who ended up with a larger group of friends as a result - no bad thing, in my opinion.

eta - i also, like sheramber, went to a rural primary school, 60 pupils in total, 2 classrooms, 3 or 4 years to one teacher. Our school fed into a neighbouring town's large secondary school, where there was a mix of kids from rural schools like mine, and large primary schools with 2 or more classes per year. We rural kids were not at any kind of educational disadvantage among our secondary school peers.

Mixed classes are just a different way of teaching, not better, not worse, just different.