Teaching assistants: Support in action

Introduction

Teaching assistants, and similar learning support staff, are part of a growing new workforce in the public sector. They are sometimes referred to as ‘paraprofessionals’ – that is, workers who supplement and support the work of qualified professionals. After an early beginning in the 1960s as ‘aides’, ‘helpers’ and ‘auxiliaries’, teaching assistants have become essential to children's learning in primary schools across the United Kingdom (UK) and further afield. If you are in a learning support role in a school, you are part of this historic development.

For convenience, we have adopted the generic term ‘teaching assistant’ throughout this unit. This is currently the preferred term used by the Government but there are many others in use across the UK. Some of these are highlighted in Emily's illustration of ‘adult helpers’. We use ‘teaching assistant’ to refer to the various kinds of volunteer and paid adult (other than qualified teachers) who provide learning support to primary-aged children in the UK.

A central feature of the teaching assistant workforce is its considerable diversity – in terms not only of titles and linked responsibilities but also of previous experience, formal qualifications, in-service training opportunities, ways of working, and skills for carrying out support work. The recruitment of paid assistants and volunteers has brought into schools a range of adults in addition to qualified teachers, with much to offer children. Their work enhances children's experience of learning in school. This unit aims to reflect this diversity and to encourage you to think about the many roles that teaching assistants can play.

One interesting feature of the teaching assistant workforce is the extent to which it is overwhelmingly female. Why are women, especially many who are mothers, drawn to this work, and why are there so few men? Why also is there a marked under-representation of minority ethnic assistants in the workforce as a whole? These are just a few of the questions you will explore in this unit.

As with teachers and their work, teaching assistants require many skills for working with children, and there is often more than one way of being effective. Later in this unit we examine the approach of one teaching assistant, Caroline Higham, and consider how she collaborates with a class teacher in a maths lesson.

No one doubts that teaching assistants are a very significant resource in primary classrooms, so much so that it is hard to imagine how schools could manage without them, unless there were suddenly to be a large increase in the number of qualified teachers. This is most unlikely given the costs involved and the fact that teacher recruitment and retention are problematic in many areas of the UK. So what is the future for the role of teaching assistants? We address this question at the end of the unit.

This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Supporting learning in primary schools (E111). [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]