JIM Tiernan is head of the largest primary in Britain. St Anne’s is in Kingsway, Dunmurry, just off the motorway south of Belfast. He has more than 1,100 children on roll, including a double nursery. “At one stage, we were up to 1,240,” he says.

St Anne’s has grown as Belfast families sought a quieter life outside the city but it was always a big school. Mr Tiernan has no problems with that but he would like to see more equity in the funding of big schools.

“We manage every year on a deficit budget,” he says. “There are serious anomalies in funding. I have 47 teachers. A secondary of the same size would have more than 70.”

Large primaries are becoming more common. Local authorities are opting for economies of scale and merging infant and junior schools to make one large primary. There are 359 primaries with more than 500 pupils in England and Wales, and more are expected.

This summer, East Renfrewshire Council opened Scotland’s largest primary. Mearns primary can accommodate 900 children and is already nearly full. It is a Private Finance Initiative school which replaced an 1879 building.

“We know that the school will be full within a year,” says Hugh Docherty, spokesman for East Renfrewshire. “We think such schools work. Parents wanted two small schools but there was neither the land nor the money.”

Despite the pressures, few heads of large schools would want to swap with colleagues in small primaries.

“You have more scope in a bigger school,” says Pat Wills, head at Blackpool’s 650-pupil Claremont primary. “I can release staff for meetings and in-service training, something you can’t easily do in a small primary. Using the new special needs budget, I’ve been able to set up a team of people and we have a social-inclusion worker who works with families. In small schools, teachers can feel isolated.”

Blackpool is introducing a “needs-led” local management of schools formula which “acknowledges the greater need for growth of budget in the primary sector”.

Other authorities acknowledge small schools’ needs with grants and allowances but heads in large primaries feel frustrated by the lack of understanding of what running a large primary entails.

“The bias has always been to support the secondary schools and the small primaries, which have a huge lobby,” says Jenny Davies, head of Westborough school in Southend, Essex (760 on roll). “No one has ever been able to justify to me why secondaries get a bigger budget.”

The Department for Education and Skills says that small secondaries receive approximately 50 per cent more money than a comparable primary. “This is largely due to the need to provide a full curriculum through specialist teachers,” said a spokesperson.

But primary heads say the real figure is closer to double the funding for an equivalent secondary.

“Three or four of the local secondary schools will have budgets double ours,” says Ms Davies. “My staff have no non-contact time for marking. I have 30 teachers to performance-manage without an infrastructure to support it.’’ Westborough went grant-maintained in 1993 to escape constraints of the Essex funding formula. In 1998, a report prepared by accountants KPMG found that the school’s budget was “barely viable”. “At that time, I had two deputies,” says Ms Davies. “The report recommended making one redundant - which I did.”

Heads point to the anomalies at middle-management level. Key stage co-ordinators in primaries have more staff to manage and a bigger slice of the curriculum to oversee.

Yet they tend to get fewer salary points and less non-contact time than secondary teachers.

“There are equal opportunities issues here,” says Frank Gulley, head at Temple Sutton primary, Southend, with 770 on roll. “There’s no recognition of the management structure you need to have. I have one non-teaching deputy head. In a similar secondary school there would be three deputies, plus heads of year - all with additional non-contact time. I have no lab assistants, no information communications technology technician, no bursar, no reprographics staff.”

Gulley argues that the curriculum at key stages 2 and 3 makes very similar demands on a school. He feels that the enhanced funding for specialist teaching in secondaries ignores changes to the primary curriculum over the past 12 years. The move to more direct funding from London alarms heads who say direct revenue grants show a continuing bias.

In April 2000, the Government announced a “budget boost” for education. Chancellor Gordon Brown gave a typical 700-pupil secondary in England pound;40,000 but the same-sized primary received just pound;9,000. This year the figures were pound;70,000 and pound;30,000.

“The Government denies that the problem exists,” says Mr Gulley. “They say that it’s up to us to spend our money. But we think we do use the money effectively and the Office for Standards in Education agrees. There just isn’t enough of it.”

BIGGEST PRIMARIES

* According to the Guinness Book of Records, the biggest elementary school in the world is the City Montessori School, Lucknow, India, with 22,612 pupils. A high school in the Philippines is a little larger with 25,000 students on-site.

* St Anne’s school, in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, is the largest primary in Britain, with 1,182 pupils.

* England’s largest primary is Revoe school, Blackpool, with 805 on roll.

* In Scotland, the prize goes to the newly-opened Mearns primary in East Renfrewshire, which has 810 pupils.

* In Wales, the largest primary is Ysgol Llewellyn in Rhyl, Denbighshire. It has 725 pupils.