What comes to mind when you think of split classes at secondary?

Perhaps that they are chaotic, bad for student outcomes, the fault of those pesky part-timers, and that they should be reserved for Year 7, who don’t “matter as much” as Years 10 and 11.

These are all myths that are worth busting. In reality, split classes can bring benefits to different areas of school life.

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For instance, classes can be split to provide specialist teaching to students - especially at key stage 4.

They can be split to allow trainees to share classes with more experienced teachers and (with appropriate support) to take on challenges early in their careers.

Training benefits

They can be split to accommodate new members of staff joining halfway through the year, to reduce overloaded timetables.

And they can be split to maintain consistency where teaching members of senior leadership may be regularly called away from the classroom for leadership duties.

When managed well, split classes can provide students with a stable and enriched education, and teachers with reduced planning loads and increased development opportunities.

So how do you make sure that your split classes are a success?

From entry routines to marking and feedback, split classes work well when everyone is singing from the same song sheet. This is especially true for any split Year 7 classes, since students have recently transitioned from having one main teacher and a handful of specialist teachers to dozens of teachers across a much bigger school.

1. Consistency

Provide students with consistency by establishing the idea that no matter which geography (or English or maths) classroom they are in, things are done the same way. If you are a head of department, pitch this to your team as a way of reducing the stress of constantly changing expectations for students. Such an approach means that split classes never cause a consistency issue. 

2. Scheduled communication

Don’t kid yourself: your colleagues won’t remember that thing you told them about, that piece of work Year 8 did on Tuesday, that homework that was missing, if you tell them as you’re passing in the corridor.

Nor will you remember which lesson Year 10 are supposed to be on and whether they have studied that poem yet if your co-teacher mentions it at the end of Monday briefing.

When sharing classes, schedule in a fixed time to meet with your co-teacher every week to update each other on what has happened and what you agree will be happening in lessons in the coming week, who will be marking what, and any other workload issues on your plate that could be solved through collaboration.

You can even use these meetings as co-planning opportunities, so that you both have an overview of the lessons within a unit of work that you won’t get to teach.

Keep written records of these conversations - either an email thread or meeting minutes - so that, when life becomes busy, colleagues can complete the right tasks at the right time and avoid the chaos that follows from forgetting or misunderstanding.

3. Split topics

There is almost always a way to split topics so that individual teachers have autonomy over a set of lessons, rather than trying to pick up where the co-teacher left off - which will inevitably lead to skipped or repeated lessons.

Consider these examples when deciding how to split topics across your classes:

• One English language teacher, one English literature teacher and one reading lesson teacher.
• One PE practical teacher and one PE theory teacher (this works with any subject with both theory and practical elements, such as music, drama or design and technology).
• One content teacher and one exam skills teacher.
• One biology teacher, one chemistry teacher and one physics teacher.
• One ‘Paper 1’ teacher and one ‘Paper 2’ teacher.

These suggestions lend themselves well to KS4 classes that timetablers are normally hesitant to split. But with a little creative thinking for your context, the same approaches could easily work for KS3, too.

4. Split marking

Imagine the scenario: an English teacher - let’s call her Ms Fredericks - has been given every single Year 7 group, and all but one is split with another teacher.

These other teachers only teach the one Year 7 class they split with her. When Year 7 assessments arrive, Ms Fredericks agrees to mark half the assessments of each class. Over a fortnight, she must mark 90 stories about “my mythical monster” and 90 PEA essays about Theseus. She then has to complete the trackers and Bromcom data for all 180 students in Year 7.

Her co-teachers have marked 15 stories and 15 PEA essays and gone back to their lives.

Clearly, this is not sustainable for poor, burned-out Ms Fredericks.

When splitting classes, be transparent about your marking load and don’t try to be a superhero. Even things out across the department and across the year, even if that means Ms Fredericks takes on a bit of marking for Year 9 and Year 11 classes that are not hers later on in the assessment cycle.

5. Development opportunities

One of my favourite things about splitting my classes with my trainees is the observation opportunities that come with the mentoring role. From the back of the classroom I can see behaviour patterns that I don’t notice at the front; I see how lessons are being taught and pinpoint misconceptions to clear up in the following lesson.

Even better, my trainees are always full of new teaching strategies that they are trying out as part of their course, and they notice things within the lesson that I miss. In their questioning and their task instructions, I hear myself as their mentor, and I’m able to evaluate my own teaching practice as they reflect or contrast what I do.

Often, it might not be possible to do regular observations in this way, or to observe for a whole period, but even stepping into your co-teacher’s classroom for five to 10 minutes can positively impact on your own teaching practice and provide you with mentoring pointers to develop the whole department.

Emma Sheppard is founder of the Maternity Teacher / Paternity Teacher (MTPT) Project and a lead practitioner for English