Constraints on Sustainable Personalised Teaching in Large Chinese Primary Classrooms

Personalised teaching is often presented as a practical response to learner diversity, but sustaining it in large classes is difficult. In this context, sustainability refers to practical maintainability within existing classroom constraints rather than longitudinal persistence. This qualitative case study explored this difficulty in one urban Chinese primary school. The dataset combined semi-structured interviews with five mathematics and Chinese teachers, three 40-minute classroom observations involving three of those teachers, and 120 purposively sampled pupil learning artefacts. Open coding and abductive comparison across sources identified four recurring constraints: restricted movement and monitoring, classroom-management pressure, fixed curriculum pacing, and reported workload pressure. In the observed episodes, limited interaction coverage, shortened or re-centralised activities, and returns to common explanation co-occurred with high coordination demands. Pupil artefacts provided complementary classroom-context evidence: some mathematics answers were inconsistent with the recorded working, while some Chinese annotations used general evaluative wording without visible textual linkage. Taken together, the three sources support a context-specific qualitative heuristic linking structural constraints, coordination demands, pressure on teacher attention, whole-class responses, and learning visibility. This constraint cascade is an interpretation of the case rather than a tested causal model; a possible longer-term feedback process remains a hypothesis for longitudinal research. The findings point to low-friction forms of personalisation that make learning needs more visible without substantially increasing teacher workload.