Teaching assistants represent around 25 per cent of the school workforce in the UK.
For now, there are around 380,000 of them, but that number is under threat. We are facing a huge shortage in TAs as many seek more profitable and less stressful employment elsewhere, and as headteachers are forced to make staffing cuts as a result of ongoing budget pressures, exacerbated by the government’s unfunded teacher pay rise commitments and the energy crisis.
This has serious consequences for vulnerable children in the classroom.
TAs really matter. They matter for children, for parents and for teachers. They knit together important relationships and bring knowledge of a child with special educational needs or disabilities to the teacher. A good TA is the glue that binds.
The SEND Green Paper makes a stronger commitment than ever to ensuring more children with complex needs are educated in mainstream schools. To support this, we will need significant resource and effective inclusion practices. Good adaptive teaching that opens up the curriculum for all children will be essential.
All of this must be complemented by effectively deployed TAs.
Some children need more time and greater scaffolding, both academically and socially. It’s this time, and access to additional expertise, that schools scrabble to keep hold of. In other words, they rely on the TA community to fill significant gaps; without them, the vision of the SEND review for “right time, right place” simply falls flat.
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At the upcoming Tes SEND Show, I’ll be running a workshop on the implications of the SEND Green Paper for TAs in schools.
The key thing to acknowledge here is the strategic role the TA plays in school life - working alongside the class teacher to support inclusion. To maximise this role, we have to break some habits.
As one colleague put it: “I never know when a TA is going to ‘rock up’ so I can’t plan for them.” However, the TA said: “I want to be consistent in that class but I don’t know where I will be sent at a minute’s notice.”
Such firefighting leads to the poor outcomes we know to be a consequence of poor deployment. It puts a ceiling on the professionalism of TAs.
Instead, we should treat them as co-experts in the classroom: a precious commodity to be planned for carefully and respectfully. If not, they will disappear from the school landscape, and it won’t just be the financial squeeze that is to blame.
A recent report from the University of Portsmouth, commissioned by Unison, found that the pandemic had led to “marked increases in [TAs’] workload and their emotional load pre-pandemic”.
The report also found massively expanded responsibilities, from helping students who had fallen behind, to filling in for specialists, such as speech and language therapists. The report concluded that the role had been transformed “potentially forever”.
The government’s ambition to strengthen quality teaching to support the progress of all is a good one, but it’s not sufficient. We need the knowledge TAs acquire about the pupils they support to give feedback to the teachers.
It’s time to shape a more attractive, respectful and professional environment that encourages TAs to stay. If we don’t make this our focus, the vulnerable children who rely on TA support will be the ones who suffer the most.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
She will be speaking about SEND leadership at the Tes SEND Show 2022, held on 7-8 October. You can find out more and register your interest here
