Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants in Primary Schools

A Practical Guide for School Leaders

Rob Webster, Paula Bosanquet, Sally Franklin, Matthew Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on the lessons from one of the world's leading research and development efforts involving teaching assistants (TAs), this book is the authors' most authoritative text yet on how to design a whole school plan to improve TAs' deployment, practice and preparedness, and put it into action. The authors use robust theories and original research to explore an innovative and integrated approach to making the most of TAs, and recognising the valuable contributions they make to the classroom and the school.

Structured around a unique and empirically sound conceptual framework, this book provides essential principles, practical tools and workable strategies, developed through collaboration with hundreds of UK schools. It focuses on ensuring TAs can thrive in their role, and presents the tools and techniques needed to do so accessibly, and is illustrated with case studies on school and classroom practices.

Essential reading for all primary school leaders and SENCOs responsible for training and managing TAs, this book is also a useful resource for teachers and teaching assistants looking to optimise the TAs' contributions.

Used in combination with The Teaching Assistant's Guide to Effective Interaction, Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants in Primary Schools is a comprehensive and unrivalled guide to supporting school workforce improvement.

Chapter 1

The case for change

Why primary school leaders need to rethink the role and contribution of TAs

Background

The increase of, and increasing interest in, teaching assistants

In the Introduction, we referred to the role of ‘what works’ in educational improvement; that is, the use of research evidence to inform decision-making and practice. The foremost ‘what works’ organisation in England is the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF). The EEF amasses, synthesises and curates research evidence for the practitioner audience via its Teaching and Learning Toolkit. The What Works Clearinghouse performs a similar function in the USA, providing a repository of ‘high quality research’ on ‘different programs, products, practices and policies’, which supplies practitioners with the information they need to make ‘evidence-based decisions’ (What Works Clearinghouse 2020).

Since its launch in 2011, the EEF Toolkit has become central to – and indeed instigated (Coldwell et al. 2017) – evidence-based practice in schools. According to the EEF’s own data, half of all school leaders in England consult the Toolkit to inform decision-making (EEF 2018).

A consistent feature of debates about ‘what works’ in schools has been the role of teaching assistants and their impact on pupil attainment. The Toolkit categorises TAs as a ‘high cost, low impact’ resource, based on evidence showing not only a limited impact of TA support overall, but a disproportionately negative effect for the most disadvantaged pupils – specifically, lower attainers and pupils with SEND (EEF 2020). We shall dig deeper into this evidence momentarily.

While teachers and school leaders subscribe to the notion that findings from research can improve practice, this assessment of the empirical evidence on TA impact – which is echoed in the influential work of John Hattie (2015) – has attracted much attention, and provoked strong reactions and some resistance. The main reason for this reception is that the evidence is at variance with many practitioners’ experiences and expectations. Teachers place considerable value on having an additional adult in the classroom to provide individualised attention to struggling pupils while they attend to the rest of the class (Blatchford, Russell and Webster 2012). Any evidence that calls this value into question, and may in turn make TAs’ position precarious – a possibility to which England’s overworked teachers are highly sensitive – is likely to perturb.

As we argued earlier, it is hard to dispute that the entire edifice of inclusion has become reliant on TAs. They perform a valuable and tangible function on which schools depend, and which survives in the face of counterintuitive and perhaps inconvenient evidence of a detrimental effect on the learning of the most disadvantaged pupils. Evidence carries little weight too when factoring in the human and political cost of removing or considerably reducing a large chunk of the school workforce; a constituency comprised predominantly of women in part-time, low paid work.

From parent-helpers to an integral part of the school workforce

The part-time nature of the TA role is a legacy of how it originated in the UK. We can identify three particular influences over the last 30 or so years. The earliest influence was the increased involvement of parents in school life, which led to a surge in volunteer 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, parent-helpers also helped with a particularly time-consuming task for teachers: the teaching of reading. The essential need for children to develop this basic skill in order to access the curriculum, coupled with the fact that hearing readers (arguably) requires little in the way of training, perhaps explains why support from additional adults was directed towards this task.

Alongside these developments there was a second key factor driving the increase in school support staff. Following the 1981 Education Act, which enshrined rights for pupils with SEND in law and put duties on local authorities and schools to make provision for these pupils, there was an increase in the number of pupils with SEND being taught in mainstream settings.

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’ – all of whom worked almost exclusively supporting pupils with SEND. Other parent-helper roles evolved into general ‘classroom assistant’ and/or ‘teaching 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-based and pupil-based support staff.

Thomas (1992) concludes that the increase in the number of, and frequency with which, additional adults 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 of assistance from parents. It was perhaps inevitable that with so many willing volunteers, some were deployed to undertake (or drifted towards doing) instructional tasks. Again, this support was targeted at the pupils with the greatest need.

The third main driver of the increase in support staff came in the early 2000s. 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 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, in order to help deliver these provisions for teachers. A key expectation of and justification for this policy was that the use of support staff would lead to improvement in pupils’ academic outcomes.

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, police) have been redefined, so others (e.g. nurses and paralegals) undertake some activities previously performed by established professionals (Bach, Kessler and Heron 2004). Encouraging evidence from England and Wales has shown that where TAs absorb some of teachers’ administrative burden, it can have a positive impact on their workload and stress levels (Blatchford, Russell and Webster 2012).

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 with SEND and those not making the expected levels of progress. On the face of it, this may look like a good arrangement, because TAs provide more opportunities for one-to-one and small group work, both in and out of the classroom. However, as we will see, it has also led to unintended consequences for pupils on 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 (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.

Education systems across the world have seen sizable and sustained increases in TA numbers (Giangreco et al. 2014; Masdeu Navarro 2015), but nowhere has the growth in TAs been more pronounced than in the UK. Over the last 20 years, the number of TAs in mainstream schools in England has more than trebled. TAs comprise 35 per cent of the primary and nursery school workforce (DfE 2020). On the basis of headcount data, there are more TAs in these settings than teachers: 271,464 vs. 249,149. Add in TAs working in secondary schools and specialist settings (13 per cent and 52 per cent of the respective workforces) and the total number of individuals employed as TAs in English schools reaches 382,886. For perspective, this is roughly the population of Croydon (London’s second most populous borough), and comfortably greater than the population of Iceland.

As our earlier thought experiment was designed to show, we have evolved to a position where divesting of TAs is highly problematic. For school leaders, TAs have become a highly relatable and tangible exemplification of the challenge of doing ‘what works’. But this challenge has been compounded by a persistent complication: for a long time, we have been uncertain and unclear about what does actually work.

The evidence on the impact of TA support

When it comes to the research on the direct impact of TAs on learning outcomes, we can separate much of it into two broad categories: (i) studies measuring the effects of curriculum interventions and ‘catch-up’ programmes (e.g. reading, phonics) delivered by TAs, which are very often delivered outside the classroom; and (ii) studies focusing on how TAs are deployed inside the classroom under everyday conditions.

TA-led interventions

Simply put, there is good evidence pupils make progress in literacy and numeracy as a result of structured interventions delivered by TAs – but only when TAs have been properly trained to deliver those programmes (see Alborz et al. 2009; Sharples, 2016; Slavin, 2016).

The international evidence (Nickow, Oreopoulos and Quan 2020) on one-on-one and small-group instruction delivered by TAs is remarkably consistent. One of the most important, though underappreciated, findings from UK research relating to TA-led interventions is how great the impact on learning often is. The EEF has been leading the way on this, having funded (at the time of writing) 12 evaluations of TA-led interventions. Ten of these have shown a positive impact¹, which, in the context of most EEF trials yielding an inconclusive result (Sharples 2016), is a phenomenal success rate.² Pupils in these trials made, on average, between two and three months’ additional progress compared to those in a ‘business as usual’ condition. What is more, additional work by Gorard, See and Siddiqui (2017) shows particularly positive effects on learning for children in disadvantaged groups.

As a school leader who cares deeply about improving outcomes for pupils, you will no doubt see the obvious appeal here. While results from well-designed randomised controlled trials (RCTs) do not imply certainty of success when applied to your own setting, they can improve our level of confidence when it comes to making good decisions about using a particular intervention and replicating the conditions under which it has been shown to work best. We will look in more detail at how to maximise the impact of TA-led interventions in Chapter 8.

TAs in everyday classrooms

Compared with TA-led interventions, the evidence on the impact of how the majority of TAs spend the majority of their time – supporting inside the classroom (Blatchford et al. 2012; Farrell et al. 2010) – tells a different story.

There are only a few studies that have systematically measured the direct impact of TA support on pupil attainment under normal classroom conditions; that is, separate from any specific impact from TA-led interventions. The large-scale UK Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project, conducted between 2003 and 2009, found a negative relationship between the amount of TA support pupils received and their academic progress (Blatchford et al. 2012). This effect was found consistently in year groups across the four Key Stages and across the core subjects of English, mathematics and science. And the effect was most marked for pupils with the highest levels of SEND (Webster et al. 2010).

Other UK studies have found that pupils with SEND assigned TAs for support made less progress than their unsupported peers, in both literacy and maths (Klassen 2001; Reynolds and Muijs 2003). Evidence from another large-scale study that considered the effect of having a TA in the classroom – the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio project, conducted in Tennessee, USA in the 1980s – found no beneficial effect on attainment on pupils in kindergarten through to Grade 3 classes (ages 5 to 9) (Finn et al. 2000). Longitudinal research from the UK Class Size and Pupil-Adult Ratios project produced similar results (Blatchford et al. 2004).

There are very few RCTs that investigate the impact of TAs in everyday classrooms, but two conducted in Denmark have found mixed effects (Masdeu Navarro 2015). However, there were insufficient data on school leaders’ decision-making and classroom practices, meaning it is difficult to conclude what drove the effects.

Secondary analyses of school expenditure have suggested the expenditure on TAs is positively correlated with improved academic outcomes (Brown and Harris 2010; Nicoletti and Rabe 2014; Hemelt and Ladd 2016). However, these analyses of TA impact do not adequately rule out the possibility that other school ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The case for change: Why primary school leaders need to rethink the role and contribution of TAs
• 2. Setting your vision
• 3. Implementation journeys: The most important chapter of this book
• 4. Reviewing current practice
• 5. Supplementing, not replacing, the teacher: Deploying TAs differently
• 6. TAs’ interactions with pupils: Scaffolding for independence
• 7. The preparedness of TAs: Improving their readiness for the role
• 8. Maximising the impact of structured interventions delivered by TAs
• 9. Conclusions
• TA deployment policy summary: Our agreement on the deployment of teaching assistants
• Teacher–TA agreement template
• References
• Index