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Institute for Effective Education, University of York: How parents respond to increased class size
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A new working paper from the Swedish Ministry of Employment explores the responses of parents to variations in class size caused by a maximum class size rule in Swedish schools. This includes analysis by parental income.
The authors found that in response to an increase in class size: (1) only high-income parents helped their children more with homework; (2) all parents were more likely to move their child to another school; and (3) only low-income children found their teachers harder to follow when taught in a larger class.
Data for the study was taken from the Evaluation Through Follow-up (ETF) project, run by Göteborg University. This contains measures of pupil performance in the final year of upper primary school for roughly a 10% sample of the cohorts born in 1967, 1972, and 1982, and a 5% sample for the cohort born in 1977. The project included questionnaires distributed when pupils were 13 with information about the behaviour of parents, children, and teachers. In addition, data on parental income and education was taken from the Income Tax Register and the Educational Register.
The authors suggest that their findings help explain why the negative effect of class size on achievement is greater among low-income pupils.
Source: Parental Responses to Public Investments in Children: Evidence from a Maximum Class Size Rule (2015), Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.