Is it maybe from the QCA famous people stuff from the history side? It doesn't ring any bells for me either - my boy's in Y4, and hasn't run into Shakespeare yet.
Part of my PGCE was a 4 week stint teaching in France. No interactive whiteboards (which I loved teaching with), about 4 computers in the entire school (ICT was one of my strengths in training), not allowed to photocopy, a curriculum that I wasn't familiar with and in a foreign language. Class of 21 kids - it was blissful. And that was one of the bigger classes; one of the infant teachers there, who had a class of 16, said that for her 20 was the cut off where you started to spend too much time on crowd control to be able to really teach effectively. With 30-odd kids there's just not enough of you to go around.
I've known more than one class with over 40 pupils in a primary school, in recent years.