Classrooms in new schools too small for number of pupils, conference hears

New schools built at great cost feature classrooms which are too small for the number of pupils, a teaching conference has heard.

Shaun Cooper, a teacher from Perth and Kinross, told the NASUWT union annual get-together in Birmingham that architects did not take corridors and storage space into account when designing classrooms,
leading to pupils being bundled in to too tight a space.

He said: "It's not just the number of children we have in a classroom - it's the physical size.

"In a lot of our new-build schools we have architects who have what I consider to be crazy equations on the amount of space needed within a classroom.

"But they take into account corridors, cupboards, all kinds of crazy things. And so you sometimes end up where they will come along and crazily put more children in a class than it's physically able to
actually teach.

"Look at the crazy situation we have in new build schools where they're making classroom sizes smaller and smaller."

Delegates voted to call on the union's executive to lobby for a legal maximum limit on the number of children in a class.

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