Chapter 1: Introduction
I absolutely love the job I do and have given 100% time and effort to it. Unfortunately this is frowned upon by some members of staff who, I feel, think TAs should be there to sharpen pencils and wash paintbrushes. I feel the opinion of TAs needs to be raised so that they are of more benefit to the children, staff and school.
(A teaching assistant in a response to the 1998 Essex LEA survey, quoted in Watkinson 1999a)
This chapter identifies the group of people about whom this book is written and briefly outlines their status and the need for interest in their role. Their relative invisibility yet continued growth is described along with the importance of management in their effective use. The complexity of their role and context is explained. The way in which the book is structured to aid managers and teachers to realise the full potential of TAs is outlined.
Who and what are teaching assistants?
Background
Teaching assistants are adults who are paid to work in school classrooms in the UK, usually directly with pupils. There are many names currently in use for these people. For the purposes of this book, they will be referred to as teaching assistants. The DfEE (2000a) Good Practice Guide defines TAs as follows:
The term âteaching assistantâ is the Government's preferred term of reference for all those in paid employment in support of teachers in primary, special and secondary schools. That includes those with a general role and others with specific responsibilities for a child, subject area or age group.
(DfEE 2000a p. 4)
Whether they are washing paintpots, making materials or working one-to-one with a child, they are supporting the learning of students of the institution in which they work, either directly, or indirectly through supporting the teaching. Enhancing learning is usually a main aim of schools. The label learning support assistant (LSA) largely signifies supporting the learning of a child with special educational needs (SEN) especially in secondary schools. Classroom assistant (CA) appears to put more emphasis on the âpaintpotâ role, and teacher assistant appears to assume the TA is an aide to a specific teacher. The word ancillary means âsubservientâ, and paraprofessional could refer to any professional.
As a teacher, head, adviser, researcher and consultant I have been privileged to work with and for this group of people since the early 1970s. In that time they have become recognised. The above quotation goes on:
The term [TA] captures the essential âactive ingredientâ of their work; in particular it acknowledges the contribution which well-trained and well-managed assistants can make to the teaching and learning process and to pupil achievement.
(DfEE 2000a p. 4)
This book aims to share my experiences with senior managers in schools so that they can have well-trained and managed assistants, who support not only teaching and learning, but also the whole school community, and become more successful and fulfilled people in their own right.
The title TA is established only in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland refers to this group as CAs. While other countries have aides or assistants, they have different titles. In the USA, the 1960s job creation scheme saw an expansion of assistants in schools and the role of para-professional was recognised. In Paraprofessionals Today, Gartner et al. (1977) described a movement in the USA in the development of educational and human services following the anti-poverty programme of that time. They also saw the role as something beyond just helping in schools:
Paraprofessionals have achieved prominence in a role to patch up an unworkable system. They must become a force in developing the education of the future â an education that prepares people for peace, social equality and human organisation.
(Gartner et al. 1977 p. 244)
In the USA, the term paraprofessional has persisted although teacher aide is also common. Teacher assistants or teaching assistants are the graduates who help out teaching staff in universities for extra money while they themselves are taking postgraduate courses. Kerry (2001) gives the role of the para-educator from a 1977 Kansas State Department of Education document. In Canada, TAs form part of the trainee teacher programme, again in higher education (HE).
Many European countries have only a limited range of associate staff as defined by the National Union of Teachers (NUT 1998), although some have staff who act as supervisors or have welfare responsibility. The Netherlands has the nearest equivalent to the British teaching assistants. Kerry (2001) made attempts to contact embassies throughout Europe, with few results.
In 1994, when I started as an adviser to run courses for TAs, many issues were already being raised. Schools had started to seek advice from the LEA about assessing the effectiveness of TAs and their value for money, as well as their management and deployment. Questions were being asked particularly about effective teaching and learning and the use of additional adults in the classroom. The TAs themselves began to ask about training and qualifications. The climate of school management had radically changed following the Education Reform Act 1988, bringing the National Curriculum (NC), accountability through assessment and inspection and local financial management. Schools and the people in them had become more responsible for their own destinies and those of their pupils.
Status
When I first investigated the subject of TAs, as I was about to tutor them, rather than just use them or employ them, the role of TAs was diffuse as well as invisible, even their name was often ânon-teaching assistantsâ, as though they were ânonâ people, the âforgotten staffâ (Burnham 1988 p. 31). Swann and Loxley (1997 p. 1) still talked of an âhistorical invisibility as far as local or national policy making is concernedâ. Despite this, I knew they performed a wide variety of jobs for which they needed various skills, and were a group with an apparent fund of goodwill, enthusiasm and growing expertise. At that time there were minimal opportunities for TAs to gain any training and few felt valued, yet they had a great deal of job satisfaction. When I had worked in schools, I had seen how useful the TAs were in all sorts of ways, but also had a sense of the problems associated with their employment, as well as their desire to learn for themselves more about teaching and learning.
TAs have had little status. Administrative, caretaking and cleaning staff have had clearer roles and foreign language assistants, technicians and librarians more recognition. TAs are not yet organised as a group and not unionised. Even now, a rough estimate is that only some 10â20 per cent of TAs belong to Unison, the public sector workersâ union. Even nursery nurses, a group much more generally recognised, were called Invisible Professionals by Robins (1998). Yet nursery nurses at least have a recognised professional body, a recognised qualification and a contractual status. These do not apply to TAs, who perform a similar role in mainstream school to nursery nurses in a nursery school. Teenagers may voice their desire to be a nursery nurse when they leave school, but few young people express the wish to be a TA and only a very small minority of men join their number, although I sense changes in attitudes from the general public as well as the media, showing an increased recognition of a distinct TA role.
While TAs have come to the fore in the early 2000s following the recognition by the government of their value in âmaking an enhanced contribution to the learning process in schoolsâ (DfEE 1997a p. 51), it is still too often as a resource to fill a gap, such as providing cover, or a quick route to entry to the teaching profession or a support to teachers to offset their career rather than for what they can do as themselves. Status is still a problem: TAs are not recognised as a profession in their own right.
What we know
Numerical increase
We know that numbers of assistants increased steadily during the 1990s although the numbers are difficult to judge accurately. Form 7, completed by headteachers every January for the then Department for Education and Employment had outdated headings which are ambiguous with regards to nomenclature, and defining full-time and part-time staff. The returns to the DfEE until January 2001 were made in terms of hours worked, and then calculated to a nominal full-time equivalent (FTE). Education support staff includes nursery nurses, those employed to support pupils with SEN and ethnic minorities, and those working in a more general capacity. The figures in Table 1.1 for 1992 to 1994 come from an report on class size by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted 1996), and those for 1995 to 2000 from the DfEE statistics office (personal communication by email; electronic data were not available prior to that date). They showed a constant year by year increase (see Figure 1.1).
From 2000 onwards the nomenclature of Form 7 changed to reflect the increased visibility of TAs in schools and reports indicate a further increase in numbers since 2001. The DfES provisional data for 2002 (statistics obtained from the DfES website www.dfes.gov.uk) indicates a total of 103,624 FTE posts for TAs in schools. This total includes special needs support staff and minority ethnic staff; 213,012 FTE support staff as a whole were employed in schools in January 2002. It is therefore likely that over 200,000 people were employed in classrooms to support the teaching and learning processes at the time of the census.
Table 1.1 Education support staff in English primary schools from 1992 and English secondary schools from 1995 to 2000 with a total for 2002
Figure 1.1 Graphical display of Table 1.1 showing education support staff in English primary schools from 1992 and English secondary schools from 1995
The literature
In 1994, I started to look for not only information to support my TA courses but also ideas to pass onto school managers. I found there was little published research, and little recognition by the educational hierarchies, national or local. Gradually, over the last few years the volume has increased but the field is still new. Loxley and Swann (1997) argued that the difficulty lay in
accepting responsibility [and] Until this issue is resolved, primarily at national level with the DfEE giving a policy lead, the result will be disillusionment and frustration with the initiative, particularly for the students ⌠they are probably the richest untapped resource in our education service. They deserve recognition.
(Loxley and Swann 1997 p. 21)
Teachersâ unions, such as the NUT and the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS), later the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NAS/UWT), were openly antagonistic towards TAs in the 1960s, fearing a dilution of the status of teachers. They are now less strongly opposed and are more open to debate, but rightly protective of the status of teachers and they still voice concerns about the growth in numbers of TAs and the possible inappropriate responsibilities being given to them.
There had been a general lack of attention paid to support staff as a whole, and particularly to TAs. Most literature on human resource management for schools still focuses on the teachers. Staff development for schools still frequently means only professional development for teachers, although Grants for Education Support and Training (GEST) have been, and Standards Fund budgets are, clearly for the training and development of all staff and governors. The class size debate largely revolved round the teacher:pupil ratio not the adult:pupil ratio until the report by Blatchford et al. (2002).
Management theories, epitomised by authors such as Senge (1990), along with ideas of Total Quality Management have supported the practice of recognition of all people who work in an establishment contributing to its effectiveness. School effectiveness research endorses this. The philosophy of Investors in People (IiP) recognises that the training and development of all staff is important to the healthy growth of an organisation, but schools had been slow to commit themselves to the IiP process. Texts supporting staff development or human resource development in schools rarely mentioned support staff except in passing, âstaffâ meant âteachersâ, and âstaff meetingsâ meant âmeetings of teaching staffâ. Appraisal and performance review work for schools even in 2000 still related only to teaching staff (DfEE 2000b), although professional development âshould also be available to teaching assistantsâ (DfEE 2000c p. 5).
By 1992 the Ofsted inspection process was beginning; Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) published one of their last pamphlets in the Education Observed series on Non-teaching Staff in Schools (HMI 1992). It predicted a likely increase in numbers, and pointed to an increasing diversity of role. Until the late 1990s, there was a lack of work published on TAs and few major texts or projects to which to refer. Mortimore and colleagues commented on the ârelatively few studiesâ and âfew education reports or booksâ (Mortimore et al. 1992 p. 5) in their research report on non-teaching staff for the then Department for Education (DfE), which was published later in book form (Mortimore et al. 1994). Mortimore's report also recognises that this omission is surprising given âthe influence of management theory and its emphasis on team approaches to institutional management ⌠HMI ⌠researchers and educational writers have failed to emphasise sufficiently the potential of these rolesâ (Mortimore et al. 1992 p. 5).
By 1995, the Local Government Management Board (LGMB) undertook a survey into the work of assistants working in the classroom. They considered there were 87,061 TAs employed in the autumn of 1995 (LGMB 1996). The numbers have continued to rise. Further surveys have been done. The Unison Survey of Classroom Assistants (Lee and Mawson 1998) showed similar results, and the NUT study Associate Staff: Support for teachers (NUT 1998) had similar recommendations. The latest survey commissioned by the DfEE (Local Government National Training Organisation (LGNTO) et al. 2000) showed an increase of 39.4 per cent from 1995 to 1999 in schools with children at Key Stage (KS) 1 and KS2, excluding middle schools. This survey calculated that 121,500...
