Listen
Pupils in Scotland 2008
24/02/2009
Scotland's Chief Statistician today published a range of statistics relating to pupils in Scotland's publicly funded schools.
Some of the main findings are:
- The number of pupils continues to fall
- Average primary class sizes fell from 23.3 to 23.2
- Thirteen per cent of P1-P3 pupils were in class sizes of 18 or less
- There was a six per cent increase in the number of pupils with additional support needs
- There were about 19,000 pupils identified as having English as an additional language
- There were 147 different languages spoken as the main home language, with Polish overtaking Punjabi and Urdu and now being second only to English
- There was a six per cent increase in the number in Gaelic medium education
- National statistics are produced by professionally independent statistical staff