The arguments for enormous schools fail to convince many parents and teachers (Supersize schools: how enormous is too enormous … 2000? Or 4000?,27 October). They see children and young people lost, alienated and unhappy in huge institutions of 2000-plus – now apparently planned to increase to 4000 – where there is diminutive chance of the students themselves developing the kind of relationships with their teachers and other adults that lead to feelings of community, and belonging and engagement.
As chair of the charity Human Scale Education in the period when the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as well as other main 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, and so rightly said: “You cannot teach a child well unless you know that child well.”[br]Mary Tasker
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Source: theguardian.com