T e aching A ssistants
How can you get the best from your school’s Teaching Assistants? According to the latest figures, there are 230,000 Teaching Assistants in the country, roughly one for every two full-time teachers. A report produced earlier this term for the DfE by the think tank Reform makes the case for a phasing out of TAs over several years to save £1.7bn from the education budget on the grounds that TAs have at best a neutral and at worst a negative impact on pupil attainment. In many schools the line management of TAs, HLTAs and LSAs passes through the School Business Manager. Alan Cowley explores how SBMs can help to improve the effectiveness of TA provision...
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t e aching assistants
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t a time of such austerity, as soon as someone in government circles comes up with a report that questions the impact of teaching assistants on pupil attainment and achievement, and then also happens to point out that they cost almost £1.7bn per year – you just know what’s coming next. In fairness, the publishers of the report, Reform, say that some of the money would be better spent on improving the quality of teaching which in their view would have a greater impact on raising attainment. The report by Reform says: “Studies have found that those pupils who receive help from teaching assistants make less progress than classmates of similar ability.” The think tank also points out that research suggests that pupil achievement is not improved by throwing money at it, and questions whether ‘ring-fencing’ the education budget is a wise use of resources. They estimate that £4bn could be cut from the education budget without compromising standards. They claim that their argument is borne out by the results of Ofsted
Schools have to make themselves fully informed about this debate so that they can influence the decision-making process
inspections where schools with relatively small budgets outperform similar schools with much higher budgets. To Reform, good results can be explained by good management and good teaching. With all that’s going on in education at present it’s sometimes hard to keep up with all developments but one way or another, schools have to make themselves fully informed about this debate so that they can influence the decision-making process. As the custodians of the academic future of their pupils they need to have a full understanding of how effectively support staff are deployed. Your first duty is to your pupils. Are they being well-served by the use of Teaching Assistants? If not, why not? What would be the impact of losing them? As someone who now spends most of his time researching various aspects of education and learning, it has become second nature for me to develop an awareness of a need for caution as soon as anyone starts talking glibly about ‘research findings’. Before you draw any conclusions from ‘research’ you have to know what was being measured, how it was measured, and when it was being measured. The largest study of the impact of support staff on pupil attainment was undertaken by Peter Blatchford from The Institute of Education, published in 2009. He did so using data collected in 2005/6 and 2007/8. The study found that: pupils who receive help from teaching assistants make less progress than classmates of similar ability, social class and gender the more support pupils receive, the fewer gains they make. More recently in 2011, these
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Before you draw any conclusions from ‘research’ you have to know what was being measured, how it was measured, and when it was being measured figures have been re-presented in the Sutton Trust Toolkit (a review of research that identified effective strategies for raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils devised to improve the impact of spending on the Pupil Premium) and no doubt this also impacted on policy advisors at Reform. I suppose at the very least, we should be grateful that their paper is based on academic research and not surveys undertaken for media companies or hotel chains! Aaahhhh...2005...I was still teaching then...just completed 30 years in the classroom. I can still remember the first TAs appearing in my classroom in the late 80s but it wasn’t until the three year period between 1999 and 2002 that funding was provided to increase TA numbers by 20,000 full-time equivalents. And do you know, in all that time, I was never trained or offered any training about how to work with another adult in the classroom. To this day only approximately one in four teachers have received any training on the effective deployment of TAs. In fact, I was one of the lucky ones. My first teaching appointment back in the 70s was in a school
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T e aching A ssistants
where colleagues would wander in and out of your classroom showing interest in what the children were achieving. The practice became so ingrained that for the next thirty-odd years I taught with my classroom door open, as an open invitation to passing colleagues. My next appointment was in another school as head of lower school. When word got around that I had spent most of one afternoon walking in and out of lessons seeing what the children were doing, the music teacher physically shoved her piano across the door so I couldn’t get in! So for me, the introduction of TAs didn’t present any kind of threat, and the practice of using other adults to support learning in a variety of ways was quite a natural progression. Many teachers however, feel that the classroom is their domain and they are uncomfortable with other adults observing their work and consequently fail to use them effectively. Some totally misunderstand the role of the TA as it has never been fully explained to them. The issue of TA effectiveness is further compounded by what the public service union Unison claim is the ‘endemic’ use of TAs to cover for absent teachers as they have a daily cost of one-third that of a supply teacher. With such a patchy approach I believe that Peter Blatchford’s research didn’t show us how effective TAs are (as Reform claims) it shows us how effectively TAs were being used by teachers, and Peter Blatchford says as much in his paper. The problem remains that the idea of scrapping TAs has now been floated. How should your school react? As a line manager for support staff, you have a responsibility
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to see that they are being used effectively. This can only be achieved if the teachers who are planning the work and deploying them within their classrooms have learned how to undertake those tasks. TAs are now used more widely because of workforce reform. They were initially used to support pupils with Special Needs as part of the provision within their statement, which tied a TA equivalence to one pupil to provide support in a number of situations. It was common practice for teachers to provide the task and for the TA to take control of it. The natural progression of this practice is that the teacher doesn’t actually engage with the personal teaching of that pupil as she or he does with others in the class. Effectively, these children were not being taught by their teacher but their TA. This, suggests Blatchford, is what lies at the root of the research findings: one-to-one contact with an unguided adult does not compensate for teacher input.
It is important that the use of TAs is not seen as an additional burden on the teacher So what can be done about it? There are two levels of response: School Teacher The school has a responsibility to its pupils and employees to make sure that they are fully supported in fulfilling the roles we ask of them, especially in regard to the development of new practice. Teachers have an individual
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responsibility as professionals to keep their practice up to date. Although the responses to these responsibilities can be undertaken in tandem, I suggest the following approach. Firstly, we need a statement of intent – a Vision. Does the school have a clear policy on the use of TAs and their effective deployment of TAs within the classroom? It is important that the use of TAs is not seen as an additional burden on the teacher. Reassurance needs to be given that if provision is found to be poor, time will be found to allow staff to consider their practice, and update schemes of work and programmes of study so that they include specific suggestions of how TAs might be used to support teaching and learning. You then need to know the range of ways in which TAs are used within your school. This can be ascertained through an audit of records of lesson observations, and records of individual professional development interviews with the TAs. It is also important to know which teachers have received training on the effective use of TAs, either in your school or before they joined your staff. If all teachers are fully trained, then panic over – to a point. The question still needs to be asked, ‘Has that training been effective?’ Here you might like to interrogate the school data on individual groups of pupils to see if there are issues about the relative progress of children regularly supported by TAs. If everything is fine it might be a good idea to ensure that the professional teaching portfolio of every teacher carries a record of such training and that whichever member of SLT has responsibility for CPD also has a record.
t e aching assistants
If your audit reveals a gap in training, make it a priority to set something up. As a first step if possible, I always like the idea of in-house provision. Identify those teachers who exemplify good practice when working with TAs and place them with HLTAs or TAs who have undergone some form of professional training, and ask them to come up with a guide to best practice. When they have put some ideas together publish them as a draft document, circulate it to all staff and ask them to add any ideas that may have been omitted. Once this has been done put a training course together – perhaps something that can be delivered in a couple of twilight sessions – and publish the booklet of suggested techniques. Above all, there needs to be a statement from SLT that it is now the school policy to ensure that TAs are being used effectively as indicated in the guidelines.
If you are in a small school and have no-one with the requisite experience, look to your partner or cluster schools, local authority or academy chain If you are in a small school and have no-one with the requisite experience, look to your partner or cluster schools, local authority or academy chain for further help. Once you have created the training resource, within the induction process for all new teachers and TAs you could delegate responsibility to an HLTA
s SLT Discussion Point
sistants the use of Teaching As What is your vision for within the school? ways in which out a recent audit on the 2. Have you carried curriculum? TAs are used across the do you ensure staff training and how 3. How robust is your TAs in the confident in the use of that all colleagues feel classroom? es of study been work and/or programm 4. Have schemes of TAs can be ified examples of how ec sp e lud inc to ted ap ad in given lessons? used to support learning to talk to each e for teachers and TAs 5. Do you provide tim within any one lesson? other about their roles e for feedback? 6. Do you provide tim effective best practice and is the to ide gu a ve ha u yo 7. Do w staff? ring the induction of ne use of TAs covered du nage and en trained on how to ma 8. Have your staff be ssroom? th other adults in the cla handle relationships wi 1.
to take new staff through the guidelines and suggested best practice. Seeing the bigger picture With so many changes taking place within the maintained education system at present, it is almost a full-time job to keep track of them. I frequently speak to headteachers who are unaware of key issues and so there’s little wonder that teachers who spend the majority of their working day in front of a class of pupils can be even less informed. Within our teacher learning programmes, we now like to include a session on The Big Picture. With workloads as they are within the teaching profession it’s very easy to take change as being a direct attack on the individual rather than an attempt by government to improve the education of our pupils. It is surprising how many times we find colleagues who are not aware of the Achievement Gap, or
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understand how the performance of some groups of children in their school – which might have been static for many years – could be even better. We find that open discussion of The Big Picture sets ‘change’ into context and it ceases to be seen as a personal attack. When staff are given the opportunity to reflect on the reasons behind the need for change they can be very supportive. Regular updates given in briefings are one way of achieving this, perhaps with some suggested reading on the CPD section of the school’s website or intranet. If your teachers are not making best use of their TAs, it is not because they don’t want to. It will be because they don’t know how. If we lose our TAs, what further impact will that have on teacher workload? It makes good sense to ensure that we are all using TAs effectively. n
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