Reassessing the Impact of Teaching Assistants

How research challenges practice and policy

Peter Blatchford, Anthony Russell, Rob Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136518423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the last decade, teaching assistants (TAs) have become an established part of everyday classroom life. TAs are often used by schools to help low-attaining pupils and those with special educational needs. Yet despite the huge rise in the number of TAs working in UK classrooms, very little is known about their impact on pupils.

This key and timely text examines the impact of TAs on pupils' learning and behaviour, and on teachers and teaching. The authors present the provocative findings from the ground-breaking and seminal Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project. This was the largest, most in-depth study ever to be carried out in this field. It critically examined the effect of TA support on the academic progress of 8, 200 pupils, made extensive observations of nearly 700 pupils and over 100 TAs, and collected data from over 17, 800 questionnaire responses and interviews with over 470 school staff and pupils.

This book reveals the extent to which the pupils in most need are let down by current classroom practice. The authors present a robust challenge to the current widespread practices concerning TA preparation, deployment and practice, structured around a conceptually and empirically strong explanatory framework. The authors go on to show how schools need to change if they are to realise the potential of TAs.

With serious implications not just for classroom practice, but also whole-school, local authority and government policy, this will be an indispensable text for primary, secondary and special schools, senior management teams, those involved in teacher training and professional development, policy-makers and academics.

Chapter 1

Introduction

There has been a huge and unparalleled increase in the numbers of paraprofessionals working in schools, particularly classroom-or pupil-based support staff, referred to throughout this book as ‘teaching assistants’ (TAs). This book provides the most comprehensive picture of the consequences of this change for schools, teachers, pupils and the TAs themselves.

We start with a vignette that provides most of the essential results from the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project and reveals the key themes we will be addressing in this book. It provides a description of one small extract of classroom interaction between a teaching assistant and a pupil. We then put this into context by drawing on further information on the classroom interactions and behaviours at this moment in time, the TA's activities over the school day, and then information from the TA, the class teacher, the headteacher and the general context provided by government. In this way the small piece of classroom interaction between a TA and a pupil is nested in progressively wider sources of information and influence. Finally, we provide information on the relationship between the amount of support the child receives from a TA and the pupils’ attitudes to learning (e.g. independence and motivation), and their academic progress.

All the information provided is real and comes from – and is representative of – data collected as part of the DISS project, though the names and some minor details have been adapted. The vignette describes the situation in a primary school but most of the details, with some differences concerning the deployment of TAs, which we will describe in this book, also apply to the situation in secondary schools.

1.1 A vignette

Meet Reece. He joined Year Six at Dalebrook Primary School in September. In his previous school, Reece had been placed on School Action because he had difficulty with reading and numeracy. School Action is the first of the three commonly understood levels of special educational need (SEN) used in England and Wales. Pupils on School Action require interventions that are additional to or different from those provided as part of the school's usual differentiated curriculum. When Reece arrived at Dalebrook, he was assessed by Jackie, the school's special educational needs coordinator (SENCo), who felt that his speech and language skills were delayed and so she raised her concerns with the local authority's education department.

A speech and language therapist then assessed Reece and agreed with Jackie. The therapist recommended that the Reece be placed on School Action Plus. School Action Plus is the second level of SEN. Teachers of pupils on School Action Plus receive advice or support from outside specialists, so that alternative interventions to those provided through School Action can be put in place. To help develop his communication skills, Reece, together with a small group of his Year Six (10–11-year-old) classmates who have similar problems, are taken out of the class twice a week to take part in an intervention programme. The intervention is delivered by someone that Reece has got to know well: Mandy. Mandy is the teaching assistant (TA) in Reece's class. She often sits with Reece in class and supports his learning throughout the day.

Deploying Mandy in this way is Mark's idea. Mark is Reece's teacher. As he feels he does not know enough about how to teach children like Reece, Mark thinks it's useful for Reece to have additional support from Mandy, because she has more experience of helping children who have difficulties with learning. Mandy, like the other experienced TAs at Dalebrook, has been at the school longer than most of the teachers. She started as a volunteer parent-helper twelve years ago when her children attended the school.

There has been a steady increase in the number of TAs at Dalebrook driven to a large extent by the availability in this local authority of funding to support the inclusion of children with SEN. Dalebrook's headteacher, Liz, decided that increasing the number of TAs she employed was a cost-effective way of meeting the needs of her pupils with SEN. It wasn't just the new cadre of TAs that swelled the school's workforce. In the early 2000s, Liz also began recruiting a number of other new support staff and widening the roles of existing support staff: Alan – the part-time caretaker – became a full-time site manager; and Crystal arrived as the school's first finance officer.

One reason for the expansion in support staff was as a result of the New Labour Government's response to a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, a key cause of which had been excessive teacher workload. The then education secretary likened this ambitious programme of ‘remodelling’ to changes made in the health service: ‘In our hospitals and GP [general practitioner] practices, we have seen how nurses have grown into roles which were once the strict preserve of doctors. And we are clear that this development has helped doctors, just as it could teachers, to concentrate their energies on more difficult matters, to the benefit of those in their care’. Such reform, claimed the minister, ‘can only help to raise standards’.

It looks, therefore, as if the TA's role in the education of a child with SEN is a good thing. Despite Reece's learning needs, Mandy's support seems to enable him to be included in a mainstream classroom, to access the same curriculum as his peers, and make progress academically.

It's a morning numeracy lesson in Mark's classroom. He is teaching his Year Sixes how to round off numbers. Mark begins by asking the class to discuss in groups what they think a whole number is. He then explains how to round whole and decimal numbers up and down to the nearest whole number, with reference to place value, and demonstrates this on the whiteboard. Afterwards, the pupils are given a worksheet of progressively challenging rounding problems to complete. As he hands her copies of the worksheet, Mark tells Mandy that Reece need only complete the first 15 problems.

Mandy begins to work through the problems with Reece, which entail rounding whole numbers to the nearest ten. As she does so, it's clear that Mandy has misunderstood the difference between a whole number and a round number: ‘Seven would be closer to ten, wouldn't it? Because ten is a whole number. So whole numbers are like tens and things like that’. As the lesson continues, Reece begins to disengage from the task. This often happens with Reece, and Mandy's strategy for getting him back on task is to remind him of the teacher's expectations: ‘Come on now, Reece. Mr Simmons wants this work finished by the end of the lesson. We've got to get this done.’

When Mandy sits next to Reece, Reece finds himself the focus of her attention far more often than he finds himself the focus of Mark's attention. The instances when Mandy interacts with Reece last longer than any conversation Reece has with his teacher. Reece is also more active in his interactions with Mandy compared to his interactions with Mark. When Mark talks to Reece, it's as part of his whole class delivery, so Reece's role is as a passive member of the class audience; he's one of the crowd.

In today's numeracy lesson, Mark and Mandy take up their usual positions. Mark spends the first half of the lesson (about 30 minutes) teaching from the front of the class, then, as the pupils complete the worksheet, he roves around the room. On occasions, he stops for a few minutes to work with a group at one table. Mandy's default position is to sit beside Reece on red table. Joining them are Nathan and Shaun (who, like Reece, are on School Action Plus) and Carla (who has a statement of SEN for moderate learning difficulties). Mandy is on-hand to explain concepts and instructions and to prompt the pupils in ways that Mark is unable to do from the front of the class. Mandy hardly ever sits with the pupils on the other tables who are the middle ability pupils and higher attaining pupils. These children receive much more of Mark's time overall than the pupils on red table. What is more, the four red table pupils are often separated from Mark and the mainstream curriculum in other contexts. For example, they often work with Mandy away from the classroom.

Working with pupils and supporting their learning therefore seems to be Mandy's primary role, and the extent to which this is the case is brought home to her later that day. Mandy has been asked to complete a work pattern diary as part of a large national survey. Today, Mandy had been ticking, from a long list of tasks, the activities she did at 20-minute intervals throughout her six-hour working day. Before she posts it off, she works out that she spent almost two-thirds of her day (four hours) doing what the survey calls ‘direct learning support for pupils’ – or as Mandy thinks – ‘teaching’. Her responses to the survey – which in her experience are common for a TA – show that she spends much more time teaching than helping the teacher or helping pupils in other ways.

The survey went on to ask questions about the hours Mandy worked and the hours that she was paid for. The time she spent coming in to school early, staying beyond her contracted finish time – all time for which she was not paid – added up to nearly three hours a week. She also knew that her TA colleagues and some of the other support staff also worked extra hours for which they were not paid. The school relied a lot – albeit, it seemed, unintentionally – on the goodwill of its support staff. In order to do her job effectively, Mandy needed to do certain things in her own time. She felt a strong sense of duty to Reece and the other children she supported, and if it meant using her own time in order to ensure she could do right by them, then so be it. Take today for instance: getting in a little early to talk to Mark about the day's lessons; preparing some resources for art in her lunch hour; staying behind after 3pm to feedback to Mark about, among other things, Reece's struggle with the rounding off task in numeracy; and assessing pupils’ work from the latest speech and language intervention session.

In fact, if Mandy didn't meet with Mark in her own unpaid time, there would be almost no opportunity for them to communicate at all. As it is, Mandy often feels under-prepared. For example, there had been no time to discuss the numeracy lesson that morning, so Mandy had to tune in to Mark's delivery in order to pick up the subject knowledge that she needed. This can be quite frustrating, particularly when Mark is introducing instructional techniques she has never seen before.

The national survey in which Mandy was participating also collected data from teachers and headteachers. Mark completed a questionnaire that sought his experiences as a teacher working with TAs and his views on the impact TAs had on him as a teacher, and on his pupils.

First the survey asked Mark about the training he had received in relation to how he manages and organises Mandy's work. He thought back to his PCGE pre-service training two years ago. He recalled a so-so half-day session on working with TAs, and had not received anything on his induction at Dalebrook on this topic. Overall, his training on working with TAs was quite scant.

Mark was also asked about the opportunities he had for planning and feedback with Mandy. His responses echoed the sentiments expressed by his TA: communication with Mandy was limited to break, lunchtimes, and before and after school.

The survey asked Mark to consider the impact Mandy has on his teaching and on pupil learning. For Mark, the support Mandy provided for Reece and the other pupils on red table was invaluable in terms of providing the individualised help that these pupils required and allowing him to get on with teaching the rest of class. She also helped him to keep pupils on task and limit instances of disruptive behaviour, so Mark could teach without interruption.

Another way in which Mandy allows Mark to concentrate on teaching is by taking on some of his routine administrative tasks, for instance: photocopying; collecting dinner money; and putting up classroom displays. Mark responded positively to the survey questions about the impact Mandy has on his job satisfaction, stress and workload.

As part of the survey, Liz had been sent a version of the survey for headteachers to complete, and it asked her to comment on the impact of all the support staff at Dalebrook. She believes that the introduction of new support roles and the expansion of the roles of existing support staff has had a positive effect on the performance of the school. But most of all, Liz feels that Mandy and the other TAs have helped to raise standards by making an important contribution to children's learning. Liz summed up her view like this: ‘Without the TAs, this school would fall apart.’

Both Liz and Mark's responses to the survey questions about the impact of TAs, though impressionistic, are based on their professional expertise and careful judgments. They both concluded that TAs have a positive impact on pupils’ learning, behaviour and their ‘soft’ skills, such as confidence, motivation, concentration and independent working.

However, the study's researchers were able to objectively and reliably measure the impact of TA support on pupils, because they had asked Mark and hundreds of other teachers to provide data on the amount of support pupils received over the school year from TAs. The researcher also collected data on the attainment of8,200 pupils in English, mathematics and science at the beginning and end of the year. They even had ratings completed by teachers on whether pupils had improved in terms of their soft skills.

Surprisingly, the results were very different to the views expressed by Liz and Mark. There was no evidence that the support provided by TAs like Mandy

improved pupils’ soft skills over a school year. More worryingly, the results showed that relative to other pupils who received little or no TA support, the more support pupils like Reece received from TAs, the less progress they made in English, maths and science over a school year, and this was even after controlling for the factors likely to be related to academic attainment and the reasons why pupils were given TA support in the first place (i.e., prior attainment and SEN status). What, wondered Liz and Mark, could account for these surprising results?

The vignette shows the general way in which TAs can be seen to be of great assistance to teachers and schools, through help with routine activities, and, on the face of it, to pupils as well in terms of more individual attention, in particular, for those in most need. But it also shows serious inadvertent problems for pupil learning that have arisen out of this arrangement. In this book we describe these problems and what can be done to overcome them. First, though, we give more details on the increase in numbers of TAs.

1.2 The increase in TAs in schools

One of the most profound changes in UK schools over the past 15 years or so has been the huge and unprecedented increase in support staff. The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) TAs in mainstream schools in England has more than trebled since 1997 to about 170,000 (DfE 2010a). At the time of writing, in 2011, 43 per cent of the mainstream school workforce¹ in England are support staff, and over half of these people (54 per cent) are TAs (DfE 2010a). TAs therefore comprise almost a quarter (24 per cent) of the workforce in English mainstream schools: 32 per cent of the nursery and primary school workforce; and 12 per cent of the secondary school workforce. The most up-to-date and comparable figures for Wales show that TAs make up a third (33 per cent) of the school workforce² in the maintained sector, and account for 75 per cent of all support staff (Statistics for Wales 2010). TAs make up 44 per cent of the Welsh primary school workforce, and 17 per cent of the secondary school workforce. In a third UK territory, Scotland, TAs³ constitute a smaller, but still significant proportion of the publicly funded mainstream school workforce⁴ (17 per cent), and account for 58 per cent of all support staff (The Scottish Government 2010). TAs make up 24 per cent of the Scottish primary school workforce, and 9 per cent of the secondary school workforce.

Government statistics for England also show an increase in numbers of a new form of support staff introduced in the mid-2000s: higher level teaching assistants (HLTAs), more on whom below. In 2006, there were 5,500 HLTAs in mainstream schools⁵ – just under 4 per cent of all TAs; but by 2010, the number of HLTAs had trebled, and around 9 per cent of all TAs had this status (DfE 2010a).

This rise in TAs can be seen as part of a general increase in education paraprofessionals with similar roles worldwide. We have found it surprisingly hard to obtain up-to-date and reliable information on numbers of TAs (and their equivalents) in other countries. Data from the US Department of Education (2010), for example, shows a 6.2 per cent increase in the FTE number of teacher aides between 2003 and 2005 – from 370,300 to 393,400. From 2006, data for teacher aides was aggregated with data on other paraprofessional personnel employed to provide special education and related services to pupils, so we cannot be exact about teacher aide numbers. However, the number of paraprofessionals overall continued to rise, and in 2007, there were 412,500 such people working in US schools. Giangreco and Doyle (2007) describe increases in support staff in schools in Australia, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, South Africa, as well as the USA. TAs, therefore, appear to be a growing part of the school workforce in many countries, though this has been more pronounced in the UK.

Later in this chapter we will describe the developments that have driven the growth in school support staff in the UK and also the expansion of the roles and responsibilities many now have. We can say right at the outset of this book that the findings from the DISS study show that the general effect of these initiatives has been that TAs now often occupy a role in mainstream ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Reassessing the Impact of Teaching Assistants
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Endorsements
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The impact of TAs
• 3 Characteristics of TAs and their conditions of employment
• 4 Preparedness
• 5 The deployment of TAs
• 6 The practice of TAs
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index