Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants

Guidance for school leaders and teachers

Rob Webster, Anthony Russell, Peter Blatchford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317442127
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Teaching assistants are an integral part of classroom life, yet pioneering research by the authors has shown schools are not making the most of this valued resource. Evidence shows the more support pupils receive from TAs, the less academic progress they made. Yet the reason for this has little to do with TAs. It is decisions made about them by school leaders and teachers that best explain this provocative finding.

The fully updated second edition of this book draws on the experiences of schools that have put this guidance into action via the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants programme. Revised to reflect the latest research evidence and changes within education, including the 2014 SEND Code of Practice, this book will help school leaders and teachers in primary and secondary settings to rethink the role, purpose and contribution of TAs, and add real value to what can be achieved in classrooms.

Setting out a field-tested process, structured around a coherent and empirically sound conceptual framework, this book:

• 
  
  

• helps school leaders review, reform and reenergise their TA workforce
• provides practical strategies to implement in the classroom
• illustrates key points with new case studies
• provides photocopiable templates and resources to support decision-making and action.

Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants provides much-needed and evidence-informed guidance on how to unleash the huge potential of TAs, and is essential reading for all school leaders.

Chapter 1 The case for change Why do schools need to rethink the role of TAs?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315695167-2

Background

The rise and rise of teaching assistants

The unprecedented increase in the number of teaching assistants (TAs) in UK schools represents one of the most profound changes to the educational landscape in the last 20 years. While the proportion of teachers in mainstream schools in England has remained relatively steady over the last decade or so (DfE 2015), the proportion of full-time equivalent TAs has more than trebled since 2000, to 220,100 (DfE 2015). At the time of writing (summer 2015), half of the workforce in publicly funded mainstream schools in England is comprised of people other than teachers, collectively known as support staff, ¹ and TAs account for half of these people. ² TAs therefore comprise a quarter of the overall school workforce.

In terms of phases, the official data show TAs make up 34 per cent of the nursery and primary school workforce, and 15 per cent of the secondary school workforce. Given their prevalence, it is perhaps not surprising to find that a significant proportion of the schools’ budget in England is spent on TAs. The last available figures suggest around £4.4 billion, or 13 per cent of the £33.6 billion budget, is spent on employing TAs (DfE 2012).

There has been a similar increase in TA numbers elsewhere in the UK (The Scottish Government 2011; Statistics for Wales 2011). More widely, Giangreco et al.’s (2014) qualitative survey of international territories describes an increase in classroom support staff in schools in Australia, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, South Africa, as well as the USA. However, nowhere has the growth in TAs been more pronounced than in the UK.

Interestingly, on the basis of headcount data, there are currently more TAs in English nursery and primary schools than teachers: 251,600 vs. 242,500 (DfE 2015). In secondary schools, the headcount ratio is roughly one TA to every three teachers. The size of the workforce can be explained by the fact that 91 per cent of nursery/ primary TAs and 69 per cent of secondary TAs work part-time. By comparison, 21 per cent of teachers work part-time (DfE 2015).

From parent-helper to part of the school workforce

The part-time nature of TAs’ work is a legacy of how the role has emerged in the UK as a result of three particular practices and influences over the last 30 or so years. The earliest influence was greater parental involvement in classroom life, which led to a surge in parent-helpers. In the early 1980s, some schools (mainly infants and primaries) had as many as 50 parents a week providing assistance (Caudrey 1985). As well as providing a much-needed extra pair of hands for activities such as school trips and art and craft, parent-helpers also helped with reading. The essential need for children to develop this basic skill in order to access the curriculum perhaps explains why support from additional adults was directed towards struggling readers.

Alongside these developments was a second key factor driving the increase in support staff. Following the 1981 Education Act, schools experienced an increase in the number of pupils with SEN being taught in mainstream schools. The drive towards inclusion had a profound effect of changing not only the composition of the pupil population in mainstream schools, but also the composition of the school workforce. Volunteer arrangements were formalised into salaried positions as ‘welfare assistants’ and ‘special needs assistants’, and latterly ‘learning support assistants’ and ‘teaching assistants’. Other general parent-helper roles evolved into ‘classroom assistant’ posts. There was, however, no consistency in how these ‘assistant’ job titles were applied across schools. Over time, people in these roles came to be known collectively as ‘teaching assistants’: a catchall title to refer to all classroom- or pupil-based support staff.

Thomas (1992) concludes the increase in the number of additional adults, and frequency with which they came to work alongside teachers in the classroom between the 1980s and 1990s, happened largely ‘by stealth’. The number of ‘non-teaching support staff’ grew as schools welcomed the offer and availability of assistance from parents. It was perhaps somewhat inevitable that with so many willing volunteers, some of them were deployed to undertake (or drifted towards doing) instructional tasks, often with the pupils who showed the greatest need for extra help.

The third main driver of the increase in support staff came in the early part of the twenty-first century. In response to concerns over excessive teacher workload and the knock-on effect this was having on recruitment and retention, the government put in place a set of provisions to help schools manage teacher workload by freeing up time for planning and assessment, and removing their routine, time-consuming administrative tasks. The National Agreement (DfES 2003) enabled and encouraged schools to employ more TAs and other support staff, such as bursars, reprographics staff, site managers and examinations officers, to help deliver these provisions for teachers. A key expectation of this policy was that the use of support staff would drive up educational standards.

The increase in school support staff can be seen as part of a general rise in paraprofessionals across the public services, not just in the UK, but worldwide. Professional roles in education and other sectors (e.g. medicine, social work, law and the police) have been redefined, so others (e.g. nurses and paralegals) undertake some activities previously performed by established professionals (Bach et al. 2004).

The findings from the DISS study show the general effect of these initiatives over the last three decades has been that TAs now occupy a role in mainstream schools where they interact with pupils – principally those not making the expected levels of progress and those with learning and behavioural difficulties. On the face of it, this may look like a good arrangement, because TAs provide more opportunities for oneto-one and small group work, both in and out of the classroom. However, as we have seen, it has also led to negative consequences for pupils at the receiving end of that support.

While the widening use of ‘non-teachers’ is the result of pragmatic and well-meaning responses to particular needs at the school level, the evolution of the TA role has profoundly changed the dynamics of classroom interaction (see Webster 2015). Furthermore, this has, to a large extent, occurred with little debate or public discussion, or recourse to the evidence of the impact of TA support on pupils’ learning.

Research on the impact of TA support

While there is evidence that TAs have a positive impact on teachers’ workload and stress levels (Blatchford et al. 2012b), until the DISS project, there was next to no empirical research on the impact of TAs on pupils over sustained periods (e.g. a school year) and under everyday classroom conditions. Much of the evidence that does exist concerns mostly small-scale studies of TA-led curriculum interventions. There are some important points to make about the body of research on TAs, which is helpful for contextualising the case made and guidance presented in this book.

When it comes to the research on the direct impact of TAs on learning outcomes, we can separate most of it into two broad categories: (i) studies measuring the effects of curriculum interventions and ‘catch-up’ programmes delivered by TAs; and (ii) studies focusing on the impact from other forms of TA deployment. The first group tends to concern studies involving specific subjects – typically numeracy and aspects of literacy (reading, spelling, writing and phonics) – and pupils in certain year groups. In many cases, these intervention programmes are very often delivered outside the classroom. The second group of studies concerns research on how TAs are used inside the classroom in everyday conditions.

Research on TA-led interventions

Simply put, there is good evidence pupils make progress in literacy and numeracy as a result of structured curriculum interventions delivered by TAs – but only when TAs have been properly trained to deliver those programmes (see Alborz et al. 2009).

Often the positive results from research on TA-led interventions are frequently offered up as conclusive proof of TA impact (Ward 2014), but the overall evidence base is surprisingly thin. The majority of this research comes from international studies conducted on a small-scale, typically involving small samples of 30 to 200 pupils (Sharples et al. 2015). These limitations have implications for the generalisability of the results: how confident can we be that a particular intervention will produce positive outcomes for every pupil in every setting, every time it is used?

The research investigating TAs delivering interventions may be small, but it is growing. Results from randomised control trials (RCT) funded by the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK are among some of the most recent research in this area, and emerging findings from evaluations are consistent with the international picture. RCTs allow researchers to compare results from a group of pupils who received support from TAs trained in an intervention programme with results from control groups who did not receive the programme (but may at a later date) or who received an alternative form of support. Results from well-designed RCTs do not imply certainty of success when applied to your own setting, but they can improve our level of confidence when it comes to making good decisions about using a particular intervention and the conditions under which it works best.

It is easy to get seduced by the results of impact assessments. Evaluations of intervention programmes appearing to show, for example, 12 months of progress in reading in just three months of delivery are bound to appeal to school leaders. But there are important caveats to add regarding how the study or RCT was designed, and the way the intervention was delivered, which can affect the outcomes. These caveats are worth discussing in brief, as they can help us be more mindful when thinking about the implications of results from such studies, as well as improve decision-making about which programmes to buy and use.

Firstly, impacts on pupil progress tend to only be measured in relation to the intervention programme itself. Most ‘off the shelf’ intervention packages come with a tool to take baseline and progress measures, but these only relate to the content and coverage of the programme. Furthermore, any effects cannot be extrapolated with 100 per cent reliability due to the restricted nature of the conditions under measurement. Results from a specific programme delivered to pupils in a specific year group (possibly in a specific school in a specific area) are unable to tell us much about how effective it is outside of these parameters. In other words, the intervention might be successful for some pupils, but not others.

Secondly, only a few studies of curriculum interventions, including some RCTs, separate the effects of TA support from the intervention itself. So we cannot always be sure how much pupil progress is down to the programme and how much to TA support. Thirdly, many of these studies fail to ask whether the impact would have been greater if the programme had been delivered by a teacher, rather than a TA. Indeed, there are studies that show experienced and specifically trained teachers get better results than TAs when delivering the same programme (Higgins et al. 2013; Slavin et al. 2009).

Finally, there is the effect of what is called ‘fidelity to the programme’. This describes how faithful the delivery of the programme is to the protocols and instructions that come with it. Interventions will have been tested and refined before being made available to schools; this is especially the case for commercial programmes. Careful in-house testing and evaluations by independent assessors will have been conducted on the basis that the intervention has been delivered as its creators intended. For example, an intervention might state it should be delivered to groups of three pupils, three times a week, for 20 minutes. So if schools want to achieve similar results to those reported in tests and evaluations, it is essential they deliver the programme in exactly the same way, and do not tinker with these essential factors; for example, delivering it to groups of six pupils, twice a week, for 40 minutes. If changes are made to any part of the programme, the programme itself changes, and the chances of success diminish.

While these factors can water down the effects of a programme, generally speaking, the impact of using properly trained TAs to deliver curriculum interventions has a positive effect on learning outcomes. There are some additional points the research on interventions raises about the use of such programmes, which we address in Chapter 4.

It is important to bear in mind it can take several weeks, months or terms to complete the delivery of an intervention; it varies. It is worth noting research has yet to shed light on how immediate improvements via interventions translate into long-term learning and performance on national tests. This is particularly relevant given that pupils’ learning in interventions is not regularly connected to the wider curriculum and learning in the classroom, as we shall see. What is more, studies of interventions are restricted in being able to tell us anything about the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The case for change: why do schools need to rethink the role of TAs?
• 2 Conducting an audit of current practice
• 3 Defining your vision
• 4 The deployment of TAs
• 5 The practice of TAs
• 6 The preparedness of TAs
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendices
• References
• Index