For context, in the US many public schools are more than an order of magnitude larger per class year. Many schools have like 1000 kids / class year.
Secondary school (11-16) is more commonly around 30 per class, 7-12 classes per year, 5 year groups in the school - so 1000-1500 kids. 16-18 can either be at the school (which would then be a smaller cohort than the 15-16 year group due to some people going elsewhere), or an external college which is highly variable in size.
1000 kids / class year is unheard of. That seems huge to me to the point I can’t understand how it would work. I knew mostly everyone in my class year up to high school and even then I probably knew more than half. Might explain why the social scene is far less brutal here than in the US.
1000 kids / class year is quite unusual!
https://highschoolguide.org/624/top-100-largest-high-schools...
Could it be that the social life at the 'prestigious college' was just rubbish, e.g. geared towards extraverted mba-types with 'default' social activities being clubbing and drinking?
So I think this varies quite a lot across the US. I tend to feel that large cities have more crowded classes than rural areas, but I have no data for that.
> school had about 15-25 kids / class year. Some of the larger years were split into two groups with separate teachers. Every year, maybe one or two kids left to go to other schools and one or two new kids joined, but for the most part I grew up with the same core set of children for several years.
seems perfectly normal from a UK primary school perspective (up to age 11 or 12 depending on the area). I'm surprised to hear that kids younger than that age would be expected to have larger peer groups in the US.