§ Baroness Carnegy of Lourasked Her Majesty's Government:
How many primary school classes for 5, 6 and 7 year-olds in Scotland number more than 30 children, and what it will cost per annum to reduce them to that number.
§ Lord SewelStatistics on class size are collected biennially as part of the School Census. The census is completed for a typical week in late September and the information collected is therefore a point in time estimate. Statistics are collected by the school stage, rather than the age of the pupil. The latest information is for September 1995. At that time, 30,754 pupils in P1 to P3 were in classes of 31 or more. There were 960 such classes. The annual cost of reducing maximum class size to 30 cannot be reliably estimated from the information held centrally at present.