Here's why size matters so much, in plain terms. In a class of forty, the maths is brutal: a teacher who somehow split attention perfectly equally would give each child about a minute an hour. Nobody splits it equally, so what really happens is the few confident children get most of the airtime and everyone else learns to be quiet. The quiet ones aren't necessarily struggling, but you'd never know, because there's no room to find out.
Drop that to nine and the whole dynamic changes. Every child gets noticed. The shy one can't disappear. Feedback stops being a tick on a page and becomes a conversation. The adult knows, by the second week, which child needs a push and which needs a moment. That knowledge, who your child actually is as a learner, is the thing big classes can't buy back at any price.
What to actually ask when you compare schools
- What's the hard cap, not the average? "We never go above X" tells you far more than "our average is Y."
- What's the ratio during the parts of the day that matter, the actual teaching, not the lunch hour?
- Does one adult stay with my child, or do they rotate through many?
A note on the trade-off, because it's real
Smaller classes cost more. A class of forty can be run for a fraction of what a class of nine costs, and that difference shows up in fees. That's a legitimate thing to weigh, but it's worth being clear-eyed that when a school is much cheaper, larger classes are usually part of how. You're not choosing between "good" and "bad"; you're choosing what you're paying for.
We built StayQrious around a hard cap of nine, on purpose, because we think it's the single biggest lever on whether a child is genuinely seen. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, come and have a look.