In recent years, Shackleton Primary School in Bedford, part of HEART Academies Trust, has seen more children arriving in Reception at a lower developmental level than is expected for their age.

Sadly, this isn’t unusual. Across the country, one in four children starting Reception are not toilet-trained. This reflects the reality that Andie BenBrahim, the headteacher of Shackleton Primary, sees in her own cohorts.

Rather than referring to “school-readiness”, she talks about these challenges in terms of children’s levels of independence. “Can they get dressed independently? Are they brushing their own teeth in the morning, and going to the toilet by themselves?”

Emma Stills, the school’s associate deputy headteacher for early years and transition, says that she is also seeing more children with speech, language and communication delays. “This can range from being unable to understand children because of their pronunciation, to non-verbal children, all the way to children who don’t understand basic concepts like positional language,” she says.

Stills is also increasingly coming across children who have poor fine motor skills, which impacts their ability “to learn to form letters correctly, if they’re not even able to hold a pencil in the correct way”.

Smaller classes, big improvements

Because of these low starting points, the school, which is in an area of high deprivation, was previously far below the national standard for good-level-of-development outcomes measured at the end of the early years foundation stage (EYFS).

That was until last year.

In 2025, 66 per cent of children at Shackleton had a good level of development - more than double 2024’s 27 per cent and close to the national average of 68.3 per cent. Year-on-year improvements were seen across all areas, including reading, writing, number skills, speaking, listening and fine and gross motor skills.

What did the school do to make such a significant impact in the space of just one year?

The answer seems very straightforward: instead of splitting the 60-pupil Reception cohort into two classes of 30, in September 2024 it made three classes of 20, each with a teacher and a learning support assistant.

The principle behind the class-size reduction is simple. “If you’ve got fewer children, then [the teacher] is going to have more interactions per child,” BenBrahim explains, giving each pupil more opportunities to learn and the teacher more opportunities to track their progress.

More frequent high-quality interactions with a teacher, the head says, work wonders for pupils’ speech, language and communication development, for example.

Easier to identify need

Meanwhile, Stills, who is one of the three Reception teachers, says that in phonics each child has more opportunities to respond to the teacher, leading to more practice time, and more opportunities for the teacher to see which pupils need additional help. “You can scan and assess the learning quicker,” she says.

“Because you’ve got fewer children, it’s quicker and easier to identify who isn’t necessarily joining in with that sound, so you pick them up straight away.”

Overall, this means that “children’s needs are met better”, BenBrahim says, because “the teachers have got time to go and address where those gaps are. And then, because we’ve only got 20 children in the classroom, we can be prescriptive about what we’re going to do”.

This means teachers are “identifying needs earlier”, says Stills, adding that having smaller classes has also “really supported” children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Better relationships with pupils and families

She adds that a further benefit is the impact on teacher-child relationships, explaining that since the reduction in class sizes, “the relationships with our children have formed so much quicker”. Now “the teachers know the children better”.

BenBrahim says teachers’ relationships with families have also improved, with teachers now having “more time to speak with the parents”.

Clearly, the positive impact of this change on the pupils has been great. More unexpectedly, it’s also brought benefits for the teachers, BenBrahim says, describing the “knock-on effect on staff wellbeing” when a teacher is responsible for 20 rather than 30 children.

Stills concurs. “And parents’ evening doesn’t go on as long as it used to, which sounds like a really tiny thing, but when you look at that across the year, and with writing reports, too, the impact is huge,” she says. Having three teachers working across the year group also means each now has a smaller share of lesson planning to do.

The practical details

Of course, there are costs involved in making this change, namely in staffing. At Shackleton this was made possible thanks to a rolling private investment, while the trust has now hired a fundraising manager who will be tasked with finding additional funding if the investment stops. An additional classroom was also available because the school reduced its pupil admission number from 90 to 60 a few years ago due to falling rolls locally.

Because the school used to be three-from entry, it already had resources and furniture for the third classroom. The only downside, Stills adds, was moving all those items from one end of the building to another once the three neighbouring classrooms that make up the new Reception provision were chosen. “But a week of moving furniture, I think, was worth it.”

Naturally, these are circumstances that not every school will find itself in. So those that want to replicate the move to a three-form Reception will need to find other solutions to the issues of money and space.

Long-term impact

Now that the first Shackleton cohort of three classes of 20 is settled into Year 1, the school sees the impact that the change has made on its longer-term development.

“We’re not playing catch-up,” says BenBrahim, because the support the children received in Reception means that “straight away, they can access the curriculum better. We can teach them at Year 1 level. Of course, we’ve got a few who are having some intervention, but not as many as before. We’re not on the back foot.”

And while some may fear that the transition from a Reception class of 20 to a Year 1 class of 30 may be a challenge for pupils, Stills says that their EYFS progress has more than equipped them for this step up. “We also haven’t had any child or parent mention the fact that they’re now in a class of 30,” she says.

In fact, Stills says she “can’t think of a negative” from the class-size reduction. “If you close the gaps in early years, you make children’s educational journeys much better, much easier, much more supportive. You’re not firefighting later on.”

Finding extra resource capacity within a school is never going to be easy, particularly within the current financial landscape. But in Shackleton Primary’s case, the ongoing investment has been deemed more than worth it.

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