Introduction

In 2004-5, £279 million of funding towards support staff salaries and £51 million for their training and development was released to schools as part of The School Development Grant (a new single grant worth £647 million in total). The Government and the signatories of the Workforce Agreement Monitoring Group (WAMG) are committed to building up the numbers of support staff over the coming years. WAMG’s letter to headteachers and chairs of governors in July 2004 stated that since the signing of the Workforce Agreement in January 2003, 16,700 more support staff (along with 4000 more teachers) had been recruited. (See the TeacherNet Web site.) This reinforces the fact that schools and classrooms are no longer the sole preserve of teachers. There are already a whole range of support workers such as lunchtime supervisors, administrators and teaching assistants who, alongside volunteer parents, keep schools functioning smoothly and effectively.

In most successful schools, the role of the teaching assistant has developed to meet the needs of a more complex and demanding curriculum, larger teaching groups, a perceived increase in SEN pupils and an increased level of formal assessment. Many of the workforce reforms will also affect both the status and role of teaching assistants and there may well be further issues related to recruitment, training and retention. One of the key sentences of the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document that suggests the change in role most clearly is:

Cover for short-term absences may be provided by persons who are not qualified teachers.

In other words, teaching assistants will, in the next few years, be required to work much more closely with larger groups of pupils with far less supervision. It is useful and important to examine where most schools are now before looking at where they need to be in terms of using teaching assistants more effectively.