4 Support in action

For some support staff, their role of supporting teaching and learning in the classroom may have evolved with time. Others may have been recruited to the role for a very specific purpose, for example to support a particular child identified as having special educational needs. Or perhaps they may lie somewhere in the middle, having started working as a teaching assistant just as the role was being reviewed and bearing witness to its expansion and development. We now focus with a degree of detail on the practice of teaching assistant Caroline Higham.