Teaching assistants don’t do the job

Anastasia De Waal, 4 September 2009

A report for the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project, presented at this week’s annual British Educational Research Association conference, shows that teaching assistants ‘do not help’ pupils. The research, based on the views of 20,000 teachers and the experiences of 8,000 pupils, whilst kindly keen to emphasise that TAs have ‘huge potential’, places a large question mark over their current impact.

The Labour government has tripled the number of teaching assistants (TAs) in schools: today there are 183, 200. The decision to invest in a large-scale rolling-out of TAs, rather than on a smaller increase of teachers, has been questionable from the start. That this latest extensive research shows evidence of TAs being an actual detriment to learning rather confirms that they have not been a wise implementation.

The DISS research is particularly sceptical about the types of tasks which TAs presently undertake. In the researchers’ views, TAs could potentially be much more beneficial. However, the roles which TAs currently perform are directly related to weaknesses in the system: which arguably explains their raison d’être.

Many of the tasks which TAs carry out are centrally imposed requirements which are not especially valuable to teaching and learning; arguably hence the fact that they can be delegated. From endless display mounting to highly bureaucratic assessment filling, a significant proportion of a TA’s duties are activities which could be dropped with little impact – and possibly some benefit.

Another main use of TAs is aiding crowd control. One of the ideas behind the widespread introduction of TAs was that they would be an asset in large classes. However drawing at least on my own experience of a class teacher with 31 pupils, an excellent TA did not do the job. However helpful and resourceful she was there were still 31 kids, a vast range of ability, one small classroom and one person there to teach. My TA was not there to be a teacher: neither did she want to be one, was qualified to be one nor crucially, was being paid enough to be one. Herein is the heart of the problem. The expansion of TAs highlights two fundamental weaknesses in government thinking. Firstly, the fact that what’s needed is considered to be merely more adult bodies in classrooms, says a lot about the government’s view of teachers and teaching. (A view which is not, by contrast, held by heads. One top primary school in Westminster which I recently visited has spent their TA ‘budget’ on ‘buying in’ an additional teacher for every two classes. In the head teacher’s view, teachers are where the investment is needed.)

Secondly, TA policy is a clear admission that class sizes and teacher workload are unmanageable for one teacher. The solution to that should be to address class size and workload.