IT DOES not require academic expertise to know that class sizes make a difference in education.

For common sense dictates that the smaller the pupil/teacher ratio, the greater is the scope for children to receive individual attention and, so, learn better.

However, the dismissal of this premiss earlier this year by government inspectors of the Office for Standards in Education is now, quite rightly, torn to shreds by other education experts.

The Ofsted report came at a time when the effect of teacher job losses through successive years of spending cuts was being felt in increasing class sizes.

It said that, outside the early years of schooling, class numbers made little difference to educational achievement.

And, on the strength of that, the chief schools inspector Chris Woodhead concluded that spending scarce resources on cutting class sizes would be a waste of money, though more than one in three primary children are now being taught in classes of more than 30. Yet even education minister Mrs Gillian Shephard herself obliquely cast doubt on this view when, in the face of rising concern among teachers and parents over rising class sizes, she promised to press the Treasury for extra funding in the future to repair the damage.

And there, in the government's public spending strategy, lies the crux of the issue and the source of the claims today by independent academics of Nottingham University.

Commissioned by the National Association of Head Teachers they have found that not only was the Ofsted report unreliable, but it was also open to accusations of bias.

But it is not just that the Ofsted report has been savaged by these experts - "superficial and incomplete," they called it - but that Ofsted itself seems to have a dual opinion on classes sizes.

For we hear that, in a report on class numbers in independent schools, they found much healthier teacher/pupil ratios and concluded that the education in that sector was better for it.

It would seem, then, for an embattled government which was slashing education budgets for state schools in order to generate public spending savings and vote-buying tax cuts, Ofsted was in the business of telling it what it wanted to hear: that no harm has been done to schooling standards.

What education needs is a scrupulous and apolitical watchdog, not a government lapdog.

And if Ofsted cannot answer point-by-point these criticisms of its findings, it should at least apologise - as should the government next month anyway with Budget pledges of extra resources to bring down class sizes.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.