The financial pressures that schools have long been facing are beginning to shift up a gear. School leaders are being forced to think about the long-term sustainability of teaching assistants, while others have already lost classroom support staff.

Many will be all too aware that when TA hours are scaled back, it tends to be the most vulnerable pupils that are most immediately and hardest hit, but feel that they are caught between a rock and a hard place.

The threat to TA numbers has the makings of a “canary in the mine” moment. But mass redundancies and the anticipated fallout is not inevitable.

The Maximising the Impact of TAs (MITA) project is a new trial funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) that has the potential to confirm the value of TAs for schools.

To date, research from the EEF has consistently shown that when TAs deliver small-group interventions, they can have a great impact on pupil attainment. However, deploying TAs effectively in whole-class settings is another matter.

“We know less about how best to use teaching assistants in whole-class settings, which is how the majority spend most of their time,” says EEF Chief Executive Sir Kevan Collins. “Our trial of MITA will help fill this gap in the evidence, and provide heads and school leaders with the evidence they need to make the most of their teaching assistants.”  

Rethinking the TA workforce

The MITA project will run over the coming school year. It will involve primary school leaders undertaking our strategic TA leadership course, while TAs and teachers in each school will receive our training on scaffolding learning and developing pupil independence. Schools will be supported along the way by specially-trained National Leaders of Education from the London Leadership Strategy, who will spend time in schools assisting implementation.

The project schools will be tracked over 2018/19, and the impact of the intervention on pupils and staff will be measured against a group of ‘business as usual’ schools.

This project is emphatically not about supporting staff rationalisation. Many of the 200-plus schools we’ve worked with previously have used MITA as a platform for rethinking and re-energising their TA workforce. Done well, it leads to more efficient and effective ways of deploying TAs in classrooms.

St. Mary’s C of E Primary School in East Barnet is one of the schools that has been involved in the programme and has seen sustainable change.

“MITA encouraged us to reflect on existing practice and how we could refine it further. It led to the introduction of daily teacher-TA time liaison and deployment guidelines for the classroom,” says Maria Constantinou, associate headteacher and inclusion leader at St Mary’s.

We’re now entering the final phase of recruitment for the project, but there’s still an opportunity for schools to take part. The MITA project is open to primary schools in and around London, Hampshire and the West Midlands.

You can find out more about participating in project here, or by emailing us at ioe.mita@ucl.ac.uk.  

Rob Webster is director of the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) project and a researcher at UCL Institute of Education.