Scottish Government

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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