The Relation between Educational Achievement and School Size

Abstract

tN a much discussed book, Pedley (I956) puts forward the view that | the sixth forms of maintained grammar schools are the weakest link Ain the English education system. Their ineSciency is a result of their small size. By virtue of this they are frequently unable to offer much variety of subjects for advanced level, and in spite of the generous pupilteacher ratio the small number of pupils means that they are inefficiently taught and lack the stimulus of discussion with others. So unsatisfactory does Pedley consider the present sixth form system that he advocates scrapping it altogether and replacing it with larger 'junior colleges'. However, factual evidence for this alleged inefficiency of the small school is rather thin, and in fact Pedley does not offer any apart from headmasters' comments and the observation that maintained grammar schools do badly in the open scholarship competition for Oxford and Cambridge compared with many of the public schools with much larger sisth forms. The observation must be viewed with caution. While it is true that maintained grammar schools are conspicuously absent from the annual T.E.S. list of schools obtaining more than six or so open awards, this may simply be because a small school has much less chance of obtaining this number of awards. Any fair comparison should compare the number of awards as a function of the number of boys from the school competing. Recently a communication by Oldfield (I958) has done something to undermine Pedley's position. He has produced statistical evidence to show that small schools actually do significantly better than big ones. From an analysis of the table of open awards obtained by schools at Oxford and Cambridge published annually by The Eimes Educational Supplement (Worswick, I 958) he shows that, although large schools naturally tend to get more awards than small, when the size of school is taken into account there is a significant tendency for small schools to obtain more awards per I,OOO boys than large schools. If his conclusion