The government unveiled plans to reopen England’s primary schools by teaching classes with one huge child or fifteen very small ones. Other ideas being considered to maintain the ratio of 1 classroom to 15 students include using hide and seek as a lesson plan, registering pupils as pot plants or counting toilet-cubicles as classrooms.
Teaching Unions have expressed alarm staff and students will return with only a school lunchbox strapped to your head as protection from Covid-19. They dismissed the idea of standing students on each other’s shoulders, cunningly disguised under a teacher’s robe, as a plot device taken from the Beano.
Meanwhile, private schools are going to struggle to maintain the 15 to 1 ratio, as it will mean increasing their class sizes by 10. By contrast your average primary school has a ratio of 1 teacher to every 15 staff vacancies.
Explained an Education spokeswoman: ‘If you have an average of 30 children per class, divide that by the 2 classroom assistants that you can’t afford and multiply it by zero f$cks we give about school funding, then you get the reason I sent my kids to Eton.’
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