New schools built at great cost feature classrooms which are too small for the number of pupils, a teaching conference has heard.

Shaun Cooper, a teacher from Perth and Kinross, told the NASUWT union annual conference in Birmingham that architects did not take corridors and storage space into account when designing classrooms, leading to pupils being bundled in to too tight a space.

“It’s not just the number of children we have in a classroom - it’s the physical size,” he said.

“In a lot of our new-build schools we have architects who have what I consider to be crazy equations on the amount of space needed within a classroom.

“But they don’t take into account corridors, cupboards, all kinds of crazy things. And so you sometimes end up where they will come along and crazily put more children in a class than it’s physically able to actually teach.

“Look at the crazy situation we have in new build schools where they’re making classroom sizes smaller and smaller.”

At the conference delegates voted to call on the government to apply and enforce maximum class size limits and for action to be taken against schools that fail to heed them.

Chris Keates, the NASUWT’s general secretary, said: “Class sizes are increasing for a number of reasons, including cuts to teaching staff, the failure to recruit and retain teachers and demographic changes in pupil numbers for which governments and employers have failed to plan effectively.

“Pupils cannot receive their entitlement to high quality education when they are crammed into workspaces designed for much smaller groups of pupils or when teachers have no time or opportunity to provide pupils with the individual attention they need.

“In practical subjects, large class sizes can be dangerous to the health and safety of pupils or can result in certain activities such as practical experiments in science being cut in the interests of health and safety.”  

She added: “There is some limited statutory regulation in place around class sizes but even this is inadequate and regulation and statutory provisions are meaningless unless they are enforced. 

“The introduction of statutory class size limits would benefit both pupils and teachers and contribute to raising attainment among children and young people, an aim which all governments should support.”