Labour Has Only Just Realised The Importance Of Small Class Sizes - POTTS

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Wed 4th May 2005

Sam Potts, responding to Labour's pledge to give 11-14 year-olds extra tailored tuition in small groups to help them catch-up in reading, writing, and maths, said:

"It has taken years of campaigning by the Liberal Democrats for Labour to finally realise that small classes make a huge difference.

"It's not targets, testing and league tables that improve a child's education, it's smaller class sizes and high quality teaching.

"The Liberal Democrats would reduce class sizes for infants to an average of 20, lower class sizes for juniors to an average of 25, and guarantee that in the core subjects of English, maths, science, modern languages and ICT all secondary school children will be taught by suitably qualified teachers."

ENDS