The results of the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project were a shock to everyone, Rob Webster included.
The study, undertaken by Webster and his colleagues, found a negative relationship between the amount of support that pupils received from teaching assistants (TAs) and the progress they made in English, maths and science. The results were based on a five-year study in schools in England and Wales and were released in 2009.
“It turned common-sense views about TA support upside-down,” Webster explains.
“There were headlines like, ‘TAs blamed for failing pupils’. And I had people say, ‘Your research said TAs are useless and we need to get rid of them.’ I’d say, ‘No. We found this negative relationship, but we never, ever, ever said we need to get rid of TAs.’ ”
In fact, the DISS report concluded that the problem lay not with the TAs themselves but with how they were being deployed.
Webster - who worked as a TA for five years - now works at the UCL Institute of Education, where he leads the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) initiative, which aims to give practical guidance and resources to schools and influence policy.
He believes that there are some simple ways to improve how TAs are deployed.
First, TAs must work on having the right kind of interaction with children, he says. Rather than dropping too many hints or completing tasks for a child, TAs need to encourage “task ownership”.
“They should always give kids the least amount of help first,” he explains. “Allow them to have a go at a task and, if they’re struggling, prompt them with questions.”
Meanwhile, teachers can help by “setting the right climate.”
“We’ve seen TAs often give children answers because they feel external pressure to make sure the child succeeds by getting all the answers right. We need to take that pressure away,” Webster says.
Just last month, the EEF awarded a grant to the MITA project to run a trial of their courses, involving 100 primary schools, and independently evaluate how effective they are.
But Webster already believes that tapping into the potential of the TA workforce is a no-brainer.
“There are over 380,000 TAs working in schools in England,” he says. “That’s more than the population of Iceland. It’s a considerable resource. Working out how best to use it is a nice problem to have.”
Jessica Powell is a freelance writer based in Melbourne @JPJourno
This is an edited article from the 25 November edition of TES. Subscribers can read the full article here. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
