Monthly Archives: November 2019

As school budgets are tightened, schools are having to have larger classes in order to cut down on the number of teachers they need. This often means you may get two or more year groups in one class, with some small schools having up to 4 year groups all being taught together.

It is essential that teachers know how to teach to multiple age groups to allow all pupils the correct level of work and support they need.

If you are a teacher and have to teach a class of mixed ages, then you need to consider your lesson and how you can tailor it to all the pupils or if you need to split the class in to smaller groups. Working in groups will allow you to give each one a separate task but remember that you may only have one TA or at times no one else to assist you.

You may start but giving the whole class an overview of what the lesson is going to be about and then set different activities for the groups, that are appropriate to their age

At the end you can bring them back together again to do a summary.

Putting children in mixed year classes has shown to help the overall achievement of the class with the younger students picking up information quickly from the older ones. It may be that you decide to split the class in to groups of ability rather than age.