The arguments for big schools fail to convince many parents and teachers (Supersize schools: how big is too big … 2,000? Or 4,000?, 27 October). They see children and young people lost, alienated and unhappy in huge institutions of 2,000-plus – now apparently planned to increase to 4,000 – where there is little chance of the students themselves developing the kind of relationships with their teachers and other adults that lead to feelings of community, belonging and engagement.
As chair of the charity Human Scale Education in the period when the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as well as other leading charitable fundgivers supported us in our campaign for smaller schools, I am shocked by the educational establishment’s easy dismissal of the need for children to be known as individuals. As Ted Sizer, champion of the small-school movement in the US, so rightly said: “You cannot teach a child well unless you know that child well.”
Mary Tasker
Bath
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