The best ways to work with teaching assistants

Over the last five years, schools in England have been granted an unprecedented level of freedom. An increasing number of state schools now decide for themselves which children are admitted, the curriculum they follow, who to appoint to teach it, and how much they will be paid.

The professional architecture governing teachers’ qualifications and training, promotion, pay, and conditions of work has been loosened in ways that will already be familiar to England’s growing army of teaching assistants. There has been a trebling in the number of full-time equivalent teaching assistants in England since 2000, from 79,000 to 243,700 in 2013. Schools now spend around £4.4 billion a year on teaching assistants.

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Yet the absence of a shared organisational vision leads to variation and inconsistencies in how effectively teachers deploy teaching assistants within the same school. And a lack of purpose gives no focus to training arranged for individual teaching assistants.

Top-down edicts setting out what teaching assistants should and shouldn’t do have been difficult to achieve – and in any case, may be undesirable. But laissez-faire arrangements, where schools are encouraged to find local solutions to local problems, have also been problematic because the issue is so open-ended.

Into this vacuum will soon arrive the Department for Education’s new professional standards for teaching assistants. My colleague Peter Blatchford and I have co-authored practical guidance with Jonathan Sharples at the Education Endowment Foundation.

Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants has been written to help school leaders make sense of, and act on, the research evidence about the impact of teaching assistants.

Read the Conversation piece here. Read the full EEF press release and report here. Read coverage from the TES here.