Class size is one of those topics that people tend to view intuitively. Surely, smaller classes are better - there are fewer students for a teacher to get around, so each student gets more teacher time?

But, of course, it really depends on what the teacher is doing, what the pupils are doing, how much smaller the classes are and a number of other important variables.

And it depends on what you mean by “better”, too.

Louise Connolly once thought that “better” referred only to attainment. However, after carrying out her own research, she has since discovered it is more likely that the “better” outcomes from smaller classes are related to mental health. And that may prove instructive to schools as they begin to unpick wellbeing issues caused by the coronavirus lockdown.

Tes caught up with her to find out more.

Take us back to before you started digging into the class-size research - what was your view on this issue?

I was the principal of a school that had a strong philosophy that children make better progress in smaller class sizes. As a result, our class sizes rarely went above 20 pupils.

I had made the assumption that my school’s progress and attainment data had increased in recent years directly as a result of having smaller classes.

Did that assumption turn out to be false?

Well, I started to look into the research and I found that a lot of large-scale and reputable research projects had found that class size didn’t, in fact, make a difference to progress and attainment.

This made me question the philosophy I had in my school.

So I started to think of all the other reasons why a small class size might benefit children, other than progress and attainment. And this led me to think about the impact they had on children’s mental health.

Was that because the children in your school seemed happier in smaller classes than the children in larger classes in previous schools?

Yes, the majority of the children in my school seemed “happy”, but I had no real evidence that they were happy because they could get more time and attention from their teacher.

When I looked for research on the issue, I didn’t find much at all. So I decided to look into it myself.

What did you do?

The research comprised quantitative and qualitative research methods, which included a happiness assessment questionnaire that was completed by Year 5 children, an online questionnaire for teachers and semi-structured interviews with Year 5 teachers.

This research was conducted in two primary schools of similar sizes and in comparable areas of deprivation - one of them being the school I led. The other school had class sizes of around 30 children.

So what did you find?

The research indicated that smaller class sizes had a positive impact on the mental health of teachers and also on the overall happiness of the children.

For example, in the staff questionnaire, 88.5 per cent of teachers thought that smaller class size made a positive difference to the emotional wellbeing of children; 82 per cent of teachers preferred a class size of between 15 and 25 children, and thought this size would allow them to more effectively support the emotional wellbeing of children; and 92 per cent of the teachers in the survey thought that a smaller class size enabled them to have better mental health themselves.

Did the pupils think that, too?

The pupil responses have to be caveated with the fact that most pupils had no experience of a larger or smaller class (respectively) so it was difficult for them to imagine a different scenario. However, I had still expected those in the larger classes to want a smaller class.

In fact, 63 per cent of children in the larger class sizes said that they would prefer to be in a class size of above 20. This compared with 98 per cent of the children in the smaller class sizes who said that they would be happy to stay in those smaller classes.

That does mean more pupils in the larger classes wanted to switch than in the smaller classes, but clearly the majority of those in the larger classes did not think they were disadvantaged by having more peers vying for the teacher’s attention.

Did that surprise you?

Yes. I thought they would want to have more support and attention from the teachers. It highlighted to me that although class size did appear to be a supportive measure for the emotional support of children overall, it couldn’t be viewed in isolation. And this was supported by the other data: the research made clear that the quality of the support is paramount, not just how available it is.

When it comes to smaller class sizes, we make assumptions that staff are developing relationships with children and making time to address wellbeing concerns, and we assume that this is harder in larger classes. Those assumptions need to be challenged.

That’s an interesting message as schools begin to address the challenges that children are facing owing to lockdown...

I still believe that smaller classes do enable the potential for a better focus on wellbeing and, as a result, happier pupils. The research supports that. But it is clear that smaller groups alone are not the answer.

The research suggested clearly that other strategic plans need to be in place, too. These include further training for school staff regarding the identification and support of mental wellbeing, the need to not jeopardise teacher quality for small class sizes and the importance of accessing specialist support.

Another point that came out of the data was that the wellbeing of children has to be promoted within their learning, and that the overall ethos in the school must be fostering and supportive.

Do do you think that smaller groupings, as one of those options, may be a sensible policy for some schools?

Schools in deprived areas that receive higher levels of pupil premium money might be in a better position to undertake this strategy than others. Or it might be that schools can’t afford to implement this as a blanket strategy for the whole school and might instead look to have smaller classes with certain cohorts or year groups, depending on the emotional wellbeing of that year group. Lots of schools now use internal assessment systems to measure emotional wellbeing, so this could be used to inform strategic class size planning.

Louise Connolly is senior lecturer for primary and early years initial teacher education at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln

This article originally appeared in the 18 September 2020 issue under the headline “How I…discovered class size can affect mental health”