Why every class here has one student in it

A group of eight students reading together sounds like progress. It is the one arrangement in which nobody can be corrected.

Recitation is an output skill. The teacher’s entire job is to hear what the student produced and compare it to what it should have been — letter by letter, in real time. In a group of eight, each student is audible for one eighth of the lesson at best, and while they are reading the other seven are silent. So the group is not eight students learning at once. It is one student learning and seven waiting, rotated.

What that costs a beginner specifically

Errors in reading are habits, and a habit takes hold at about the fifth uncorrected repetition. A student who mispronounces a letter in a group class will repeat it for the rest of the session, then all week at home, and will arrive at the next class having practised it wrong forty times. Unlearning that costs more than learning it correctly cost in the first place.

• A one-to-one class corrects at the first repetition. A group class corrects at the fortieth, if at all.
• A shy student in a group reads quietly enough not to be heard, which is a rational response and a disaster.
• A fast student in a group is held to the pace of the slowest reader, and a slow one is dragged past the point they stopped understanding.

The trade-off we accept

One-to-one costs more per student to deliver — there is no way around that, and it is why fees are what they are rather than a fraction of them. What it buys is that a class is never a place where a student sits quietly and is recorded as having attended.

The other thing it buys is that the same teacher hears the same student every week and remembers where they stopped, which is not a scheduling detail. Progress in reading is mostly the accumulated memory of what this particular student gets wrong, and that memory does not survive a rota.