the large number of teachers and school leaders is driven by the significant proportion of smallclass schools in the country and strict staffing norms the large number of staff squeezes school budgets creates rigidities and crowds out investments in other areas about of school expenditure in rural schools is devoted to staff compensation this means that budgets are very tight and that principals have very limited room for manoeuvre to manage resources in a more efficient way or invest in school development activities in particular the large number of staff discourages improvements in their compensation which is considered low in kazakhstan although the complexity of the teacher salary structure hinders its analysis the definition of class sizes is a recurrent tradeoff that has a great impact on expenditure due to the labourintensive nature of education small class sizes require a large number of teachers whilst greater class sizes can free up resources to improve teaching quality