The Class Size Debate: Is Small Better?

It is my great pleasure to thank a number of people for their contribution to this book. I want, first of all, to thank my colleagues at the Institute of Education who have worked with me on the Class Size Research Project. Paul Bassett was the statistician, and his analyses have been a model of clarity and rigour. Harvey Goldstein conducted some of the early analyses and gave invaluable advice throughout the project. Clare Martin has been the research officer since the earliest days, and had the unenviable task of organizing and processing the large volume of data. Gemma Catchpole was the research officer on the Key Stage 2 phase of the project. Suzanne Edmonds and Viv Moriarty worked on parts of the project, reported in this book. I would also like to thank my colleagues Peter Kutnick at the University of Brighton and Ed Baines who have worked with me on research into within-class grouping, which has informed some of the text in this book. Although I wrote the text, all these colleagues have contributed, in many important ways, to the project, and have co-authored a number of other papers on which this book is based.

I want to thank Kim Reynolds, who has been the project secretary throughout its life, for her patience, good humour and informed discussions about football (despite an unfortunate affinity for a certain north London football team).

I would also like to thank Peter Mortimore, who was director of the Institute of Education, for his invitation to collaborate with him on a paper for the National Commission for Education, and his support in getting the Class Size Research Project under way.

I would like to give special thanks to the staff in local education authorities (LEAs), and teachers and head teachers in schools, who have worked so hard to provide the information for the project and, of course, to the children in those schools.

The research would not have been possible without the far-sightedness of the participating LEAs, who contributed funds to the early phases of the research, and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) for funding the last year of the project, which focused on pupil-adult ratios. I would like to thank, particularly, Judy Sebba in the DfES for being a good critical friend of the project and for her incisive chairing of the steering committee, and also to Victoria White for her help. Thanks are also due to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding research on within-class grouping, which was co-directed by Peter Kutnick and myself.

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