When I saw the news that Teach First was to recruit up to 1,000 academic mentors to help with catch-up work after the disruptions caused by Covid-19, I was curious as to what was going on there. I wanted to know what, if anything, that would mean for the people in schools already doing this work: teaching assistants. 

Before recruiting new people, it would make sense to look at what resources you have in the system. Even the Department for Education (DfE) had indicated in its Covid guidance earlier this month that TAs could be used to do intervention schemes for catch up.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) shows that the evidence in favour of TA-led interventions is consistently good. In the EEF toolkit, nothing comes close, in terms of improving learning outcomes, to using TAs to lead interventions.

Train TAs to do catch-up programmes in reading, phonics or maths and kids tend to do well, making an average of between two and three months’ additional progress, according to the toolkit. 

A tailormade intervention

It would seem that this is TAs’ moment. Delivering catch-up interventions is a role tailormade for them. Use these people, and kids can make up for lost time. 

Of course, this wouldn’t be a silver bullet - it would form part of what we do as a wider strategy. But it’s there for the taking, really. And the Teach First scheme seems to overlook that. 

I can understand why TAs feel a little bit put out that they’ve been passed over. Again.

The DfE guidance for September argues that no child with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) should be missing out. I wonder whether they’re concerned that, if schools start deploying TAs to do catch up, then kids with SEND could be missing out somehow. 

There are other arguments in favour of the Teach First scheme, too. Eventually, these mentors are going to be let go - maybe after a year, maybe before that. And, meanwhile, Teach First is building up a base of people who might be interested in doing teacher training within a year or two. You wouldn’t be able to convert a base of TAs into teachers in quite the same way. 

A bit of a sore point

All the same, the Teach First mentors will be given one week’s training, if they have qualified teacher status (QTS), and two weeks’ training if they haven’t. (I’m slightly puzzled as to why someone with QTS would go for this at all.) An experienced TA, with years under their belt, will see someone come in with two weeks’ training and be given the kinds of jobs and responsibilities that are their bread and butter - and for roughly the same salary. 

I can imagine that’s a bit of a sore point. TAs will see these new, fresh people coming into the scheme and may well ask the question: “What does this mean for me, having this cohort of younger people come in? I do interventions. That’s what I’m trained to do. If they’re doing it, what does that mean for me?”

Once again, there’s a development in the conversation about what we do in schools that has overlooked a quarter of the school’s workforce. For some TAs, this will add to that sense of: here we go again - another thing where we’re not part of the conversation. It adds to the question of how they feel in school, and whether they feel valued by the government, or by the DfE. 

Looking over TAs’ heads

Rather than looking at what we have as an education system, and then working from there, the DfE is once again looking over TAs’ heads and searching for a different solution. 

It keeps happening. We’ve had this perpetual problem with teacher recruitment and teacher supply and the answer always seems to be somewhere else, rather than in front of us. We could painlessly convert a number of TAs into teachers every year, but the answer is always Troops to Teachers, or some other scheme. It’s not that these are bad schemes in themselves, but they all add to the repeated sense of overlooking TAs. 

Today, the government has just announced a pay rise for teachers. But what about TAs? Sometimes, even the fact that they’re not mentioned is a sign that they’re not being thought about. Have they been deliberately overlooked again? Or is their pay rise in the detail of the announcement, but not in the reporting? This is not an uncommon experience for TAs. 

In the massive upheaval of Covid, some schools are saying that they would have had to close completely if they hadn’t had TAs come in and help out. They’ve been part of keeping the show on the road. Then, when something like this happens, I can almost see the collective rolling of eyes. 

Rob Webster is an associate professor at the Centre for Inclusive Education, UCL Institute of Education, and a lecturer at the University of Reading. He created the award-winning Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants programme