CHAPTER 1
The Wider Childrenās Workforce in Primary Schools
The government considers the childrenās workforce to mean everyone who works with children and young people and their families, or who is responsible for improving their outcomes.
Building Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Childrenās Workforce (Department for Children, Schools and Families 2008)
The changing nature of primary school personnel
Figure 1.1 provides an overview of the Core and Wider Childrenās Workforce and is adapted from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) 2008 document Building Brighter Futures. It was later extended in a further DCSF publication 2020 Children and Young Peopleās Workforce Strategy. At present, the DCSF separates out a Core Childrenās Workforce and a Wider Childrenās Workforce. It defines the core as those professionals who work or volunteer with children, young people and their families, or who are responsible for their outcomes all the time. The Wider Childrenās Workforce is defined as those who work or volunteer with children, young people and/or their families part of the time, or who are responsible for their outcomes as part of their jobs. Interviews in the second part of this book cover both.
I have narrowed the focus to children of compulsory school age in primary schools, i.e. from 5 to 11 years. One reason for this is because the Foundation Stage, birth to 5
years, in its widest sense, deserves a book of its own, as do the secondary and special needs sectors, although there are many overlapping features.
I have also tried to limit the focus to those members of the wider school workforce who come into primary school to work directly with children, but have also provided some examples of professionals who work with primary children outside schools, for example the Study Support coordinator. This distinction is disappearing slightly, as more and more schools house multi-agency workers; for example childrenās centres attached to a primary school may have rooms on site for ātravellingā educational professionals, such as speech therapists and educational psychologists. Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) share and build new multipurpose health clinics alongside primary schools, so primary carers can take themselves and their children to the GP, nurse practitioner or dentist on their way to and from school.
Sometimes you might hear the terms āparaprofessionalā or āallied professionalsā used to describe school-based professionals, such as teaching assistants, but this is a rather demeaning term that denies the specific professional skills they require in order to fulfil their responsibilities.
The Training and Development Agency (TDA) refers to ālearning support staffā, and this covers teaching assistants (TAs), Higher Level Teaching Assistants (HLTAs), nursery nurses, cover supervisors, pupil support workers, administrative staff, specialist and technical staff, site staff and school business managers. The website, at the time of writing, covered a section on support staff roles, career development, national occupational standards, training and qualification. However, there is surprisingly little information on many other support roles, or on the much wider aspects of support staff roles in relation to the Integrated Childrenās Workforce.
Ofsted and the wider school workforce
Interestingly enough, Ofsted, in their 2008 report on the wider school workforce, made this a specific recommendation for the TDA. They visited 23 primary and secondary schools to evaluate how effectively the reforms to the workforce had been implemented. They looked at deployment, training and development of the wider workforce, and the impact on the quality of teaching and learning and on the lives of the pupils and their families. This overambitious remit resulted in a report of just 23 A4 pages but it did recommend that the TDA should help the wider workforce and their managers to gain a āsecure knowledge and understanding of the national occupational standards and the career development framework by providing accessible information and guidanceā.
None of the 28 people whom I interviewed mentioned or seemed to know about the national occupational standards or the career development framework, although several did mention professional development. This perhaps links with another of Ofstedās 2008 recommendations that schools need āto improve their detailed knowledge and understanding of the role of the TDA and make full use of the national occupational standards and the career development framework to develop the wider workforceā.
Meanwhile, Ofsted will continue to monitor the effectiveness of the reforms to the school workforce and this book will, hopefully, contribute to the knowledge base for that workforce in any one primary school.
Defining the educational professional in primary schools
Many of those attending the safeguarding conference, mentioned earlier in the introduction, would not have defined themselves as either members of the wider school workforce or educational professionals ā the governors and the vicar for example. The role of the educational professional in this book, however, is defined very widely to include all of those whose role and responsibilities include working with children in school. It is recognised that they are multiprofessional, as well as being multi-agency workers.
By defining them as being āeducational professionalsā when working with primary school children we acknowledge that there is a specific educational expertise that is needed to do this work effectively. There is a knowledge and skills base that enhance childrenās learning and which those working with children either have or need to develop.
There is an acknowledgement within the current documentation that a childrenās workforce āencompasses a diverse range of professions and occupationsā. This includes people with a wide range of professional identities. It also includes people with very different levels of qualification, training, employment arrangements, and terms and conditions under which they work. Educational professionals may also work in the public, private and/or third sector, or they may be volunteers, as the interviews in the second part of this book demonstrate. Even here it is sometimes difficult to identify whether a āprofessionalā is that part of their role for which they are paid or their volunteer role. For example, one of the parent volunteers interviewed was also a paid welfare assistant in the same school and both she and the school had difficulty distinguishing some of the different aspects of what she did.
There are specific issues here that are related to professional identities and terms and conditions of work, which lead to some specific challenges, and, operationally, we should be thankful that so many educational professionals seek to make a difference in childrenās lives and prioritise that.
Here in this book we also look at some people who work mainly with adults, such as the parent mentor and the healthy schools manager, but whose work is also related to improving childrenās lives and breaking down barriers to learning.
Professional identity
Health workers, such as school nurses, who come into school and work with children, are specifically trained in their own profession, for example health. So their āprofessional identityā is health, and their work in schools makes them a specific sort of āeducational professionalā. The interview with the school nurse in Chapter 10, however, challenges this assumption that the school nurse is regularly in primary schools. Increasingly, training for āprofessional identityā will involve more practice in other settings and training with people from other disciplines. This has already led to the creation of new forms of posts, for which individuals are trained more generically and professionals become, in theory, less defined by their initial and more specific professional identities. In this particular case, the school nurse was no longer responsible, at an operational level, for doing the screening; this job was now undertaken by specially trained workers who were paid at a much lower rate than the nurse. The nurseās role was to oversee the results of the screening and organise any follow-up if required.
School workforce reform also challenges the traditional view of a professional as āan occupation that controls its own work, organized by a special set of institutions sustained in part by a particular ideology of expertise and serviceā (Friedson 1994) or dual professionalism as āan ideology of expertise and service which is drawn from two occupations, which are organised by two special sets of institutionsā.
In the past, considerable research has been carried out into āprofessional identityā and how it can be developed initially and then changed as required. A summary of this research by Brott and Kajs (2001) suggests some key points for success in developing ...