Primary schools in rural areas generally have to deal with small student populations and/or declining student enrollments. This has important implications for these schools, which among others have to work with a smaller professional team and smaller school budgets, since financing is generally largely based on number of students. The issue of small school size and declining enrollment is urgent in many countries in- and outside Europe, for example in Finland (Kalaoja & Pietarinen, 2009), Sweden (Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009), Norway and Great Britain (Hargreaves, Kvalsund, & Galton, 2009), Scotland (Wilson & McPake, 2000), the Netherlands (Inspectorate of Education, 2012), Canada (Declining Enrolment Working Group, 2009) and Australia (Wildy & Clarke, 2008).
Small and declining student populations are generally seen as undesirable (Kvalsund & Hargreaves, 2009): by schools because they are forced to deal with a situation they did not opt for and by policy makers because small schools are more expensive. Furthermore, there are concerns about the effects of small schools on the cognitive and non-cognitive development of students. Fear is that students will not perform as well as they would have in larger schools, because educational quality is at risk due to multigrade classrooms, less expertise in the team and less opportunities for specialized care. Another fear is that the shortage of same-age, same-sex peers hampers students’ social-emotional development. In the Netherlands, these arguments led the Education Council (2013) to propose a minimum school size of 100 students for primary education, although there are also many Dutch schools with a population of less than 100 students that perform well (Inspectorate of Education, 2013). It is however difficult to determine an evidence based minimum required school size, because international studies on the effects of small schools often define ‘small’ as a broad category or use school size as a continuum, only indicating whether ‘bigger’ or ‘smaller’ size is related to student outcomes (Luyten, Hendriks, & Scheerens, 2013; Zoda, Combs, & Slate, 2011).
There do seem to be some specific characteristics of small schools that may influence educational quality, like a smaller team, less time for educational leadership by the school leader (Faber, van der Horst, & Visscher, 2013) and multigrade classrooms (Miller, 1991). These characteristics could considered to be risk factors, but do not necessarily have negative effects on educational quality. They may actually be used to the advantage, for example by creating expertise teams of teachers of different schools or by using the advantage of the flexibility of small teams (Vulliamy & Webb, 1995) and the social cohesion in small schools where everybody knows each other.
In short, the leading opinion, especially within educational policy, seems to be that small school size is a risk for the development of students and should therefore be avoided, for example by school merges or -closures (Haartsen & Van Wissen, 2012). However, losing the intimacy of a small school or even losing the last school in the village often leads to strong reactions by parents and the local community. The goal of the current presentation is to give an overview of the available empirical data on the effects of small schools on students, the characteristics of small schools and the specific problems they may face. Aim is to add to the discussion by providing more empirical evidence in a context where arguments are often clouded by sentiments, in order for governments and school (boards) to make more grounded decisions on suitable reactions to small and declining student populations. In addition, best practices will be provided on how to react to declining student populations and how to improve and maintain educational quality within small schools.
