SENATOR Grace Poe filed a bill that seeks to regulate class size and conditions in public schools.

In her Senate Bill 541 or the proposed Class Size and Conditions Act, Poe stressed that class size has a considerable impact on students’ learning.

“Students in smaller classes tend to perform better in all subjects and all assessments when compared to those in larger classes,” she said in her explanatory note.

The bill aims to ensure access to quality education and to give protection to teachers from unregulated increases in class size and compensation commensurate to their workload.

The measure mandates the Department of Education, in consultation with the Department of Health, to set the number of students of each class to be handled by a single teacher.

The bill proposes to consider a class with not more than 35 students as standard. A class of 45 students shall be considered large.

A teacher handling a large class shall be entitled to a large honorarium equivalent to one percent of her daily rate for every student in excess of the standard class size of 35.