I took a quick stroll over to the Malcolm X Centre this evening for a presentation by the team hoping to create an Urban Village School in St Werburgh. They've recently been featured on the front page of the Bristol Evening Post, and today the headline act was former local secondary head James Wetz, introducing his recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme "The Children Left Behind".

The goal is to create a secondary school of around 350 peoples - a marked contrast to modern trends in the state sector to build schools with over a thousand pupils - using the principles of "Human-Scale Education",

Human Scale Education was set up in 1985 with the aim of promoting small, human scale learning communities within the state maintained and independent sectors of education. Human scale learning environments can foster the positive relationships that enable teachers to know their students well and make possible a more holistic approach to learning that engages the whole person.

A contention of proponents of Human-Scale Education is that UK primary schools offer a better standard of education because their small size allows teachers and pupils to form stronger relationships. James Wetz offered a compelling statistic to support this: of the children who leave secondary school with no qualifications, 40% of them exited primary school with marks that were average or above average. He reported the comments of a Primary Head teacher to a group of Secondary Head teachers: "So what do you do to them?".

For maximum ironic effect, this initiative is being launched just as Bristol Council are proposing plans to "super-size" many of the city's primary schools, allegedly because they "do not give the best value for money for council tax payers".

I hope this works out well for the St Werburgh's team. They've got a lot of obstacles to overcome, particularly since their stated goal is to create a school within the state sector through the "department for children, schools and families" [sic]. Two key problems they will face are the National Curriculum and the Teachers' Unions.

The National Curriculum has few champions outside Whitehall. For some the problem is that it constrains the creativity of teachers; for others the emphasis on tests and targets doesn't leave enough time for learning. Looking at the American examples given in James Wetz's film, many of the schools had negotiated independence from the equivalent US structure - typically a mandated curriculum approved by an elected school board.

The number that did shock me was the Pupil-Teacher Ratio in the UK. Would it surprise you to know it's around 16.1 pupils per teacher (Full Time Equivalent)? In fact, adding in all support staff excluding admit and clerical, on average in UK Secondary schools there are 1 staff members for every 11 pupils. And yet average class sizes are around 21-22 [anyone got the latest stats?]. So what are all the non-teaching teachers doing? A great many of them are in management roles; roles that would be unnecessary if large schools were replaced by numerous small schools. The loss of large numbers of Deputy-Head and SMT roles is unlikely to go down well with the teaching profession.

One thing that did occur to me was whether the project could work if the goal was just "build a school" rather than specifically a state school. I'm preparing an update to an old piece on Redland Green School, for which I've obtained some Quantity Surveyor's estimation sheets. The slightly out-of-date rule of thumb is that it costs around £1500 per square meter to build a new school, and another £1500 to fill it with furniture, carpets, white boards and those little pots of white glue that don't stick anything. If we go with a figure of about 8 square meters per pupil, a "human-scale" school for 350 pupils, would cost around £8,400,000.

A big wodge of cash, but not completely beyond the means of a motivated group of parents and a good fund raising operation. Dealing with the circa £1,500,000 per year in operating costs would be a challenge, but perhaps an opportunity to test-drive an education voucher scheme, and give local parents the chance to make real choices about their children's futures. Because one thing that is often forgotten is that it is to the parents that schools should be offering their services, not to the children and certainly not to the state.

P.S. Elected Ashley Councillor Jon Rogers was there, but no sign of his colleague Shirley Marshall. And now for a musical interlude...