The Adult Sitting Next to Your Child
England has more teaching assistants than ever, and most parents in the SEND system are fighting for hours of them. The biggest British study of what those adults actually do found that the children getting the most support made the least progress - and the reason has nothing to do with the assistants.
Ask a parent who has been through an EHCP assessment what they were fighting for, and somewhere in the answer there will be hours. Hours of adult support, written down, signed off, legally owed. It is the currency the whole system trades in.
England now has more of those adults than at any point since anyone bothered to count them. As of last November there were 295,200 full-time equivalent teaching assistants in state schools, up a third since 2011. Over roughly the same stretch, teacher numbers went the other way, down to 466,400.
That is not an accident. One in five children in England is now recorded as having some form of special educational need, and nearly 540,000 have an education, health and care plan - almost 12 per cent more than the year before. Extra adults in the room are the system's main answer to all of it.
Which makes it awkward that the biggest British study of what those adults actually do found something nobody wanted to hear.
Not marginally. Consistently, across year groups, once you accounted for the fact that these were the children who were struggling in the first place.
The obvious reading is that teaching assistants are bad at the job. The researchers were clear that this was not what they found. What they found was a problem with how schools were using them.
Here is the shape of it. The assistant drifts into being the main person teaching the children who find learning hardest. She picks up the lesson as it goes, usually with no planning time, often with no training in the subject, and she is doing it with the children who need the most skilled teaching in the building. So the child with the greatest need ends up spending the most time with the least qualified adult. Nobody designed that. It just happens, lesson after lesson, because it looks like help.
Time with classmates went the other way: 16 per cent for pupils with a plan, 27 per cent for the rest. In most of the lessons observed, those pupils were in separate sets for lower attainers anyway. So the extra adult arrives, and the child quietly ends up at the edge of the room - away from the teacher, away from the other children, in a small two-person bubble that looks like inclusion from the doorway.
Then there is the thing every parent recognises instantly. When a helpful adult is permanently within arm's reach, children stop trying first. They learn to wait. The hand goes up, or doesn't even need to, and the answer arrives. Independence is the one thing the support is meant to build, and proximity is very good at eroding it.
But the gains come with conditions attached, and they are specific. Short sessions, twenty to fifty minutes. Three to five times a week. Kept up for eight to twenty weeks. A structured programme rather than general helping. And the assistant properly trained to deliver that programme, which in the successful studies meant anywhere from five to thirty hours of training.
The other condition is the one that matters most. The support has to add to the teaching, not replace it. Where researchers found negative effects, it was almost always because time with the assistant had come instead of time with the teacher.
So the question was never whether another adult helps. It is what that adult is doing, and whether your child is still getting the teacher.
When that happens, the support has to come from somewhere. Staff reported that what got dropped was classroom help, the one-to-one hours attached to a child's EHCP, curriculum interventions and therapy sessions. The hours exist on the plan and vanish in the week. No letter goes home about it.
It is not hard to see why schools do it. The NFER found last autumn that 77 per cent of secondary leaders and 74 per cent of primary leaders were struggling to recruit teaching assistants - harder, in primary, than recruiting teachers. School support staff earn roughly a third less per week than comparable workers elsewhere. We have built the main plank of SEND provision on the lowest-paid, least-trained, most easily reassigned people in the building.
In the meantime, the useful conversation at parents' evening is not about the number of hours. It is three slightly different questions: who is actually teaching my child in maths, what happens in the sessions she is taken out for, and does the teacher plan them.
Most of us assume the adult beside our child is the protective thing, the bit we fought for. The evidence says the protective thing is the teacher, and the adult beside her is only worth having if she is doing something a teacher could not do in that moment anyway.
England now has more of those adults than at any point since anyone bothered to count them. As of last November there were 295,200 full-time equivalent teaching assistants in state schools, up a third since 2011. Over roughly the same stretch, teacher numbers went the other way, down to 466,400.
That is not an accident. One in five children in England is now recorded as having some form of special educational need, and nearly 540,000 have an education, health and care plan - almost 12 per cent more than the year before. Extra adults in the room are the system's main answer to all of it.
Which makes it awkward that the biggest British study of what those adults actually do found something nobody wanted to hear.
The Finding Nobody Wanted
The study was called DISS, run out of the Institute of Education over five years and published in 2009. It tracked thousands of pupils and watched what happened in ordinary lessons. The headline result was blunt: the children who got the most teaching assistant support made less progress than similar children who got less of it.Not marginally. Consistently, across year groups, once you accounted for the fact that these were the children who were struggling in the first place.
The obvious reading is that teaching assistants are bad at the job. The researchers were clear that this was not what they found. What they found was a problem with how schools were using them.
Here is the shape of it. The assistant drifts into being the main person teaching the children who find learning hardest. She picks up the lesson as it goes, usually with no planning time, often with no training in the subject, and she is doing it with the children who need the most skilled teaching in the building. So the child with the greatest need ends up spending the most time with the least qualified adult. Nobody designed that. It just happens, lesson after lesson, because it looks like help.
Quietly Outside the Lesson
The second thing that happens is harder to see from the kitchen table. A later project funded by the Nuffield Foundation sat in on secondary lessons and counted who children talked to. Pupils with an EHCP spent about 15 per cent of lesson time interacting with a teaching assistant. For everyone else the figure was 1 per cent.Time with classmates went the other way: 16 per cent for pupils with a plan, 27 per cent for the rest. In most of the lessons observed, those pupils were in separate sets for lower attainers anyway. So the extra adult arrives, and the child quietly ends up at the edge of the room - away from the teacher, away from the other children, in a small two-person bubble that looks like inclusion from the doorway.
Then there is the thing every parent recognises instantly. When a helpful adult is permanently within arm's reach, children stop trying first. They learn to wait. The hand goes up, or doesn't even need to, and the answer arrives. Independence is the one thing the support is meant to build, and proximity is very good at eroding it.
What the Same Research Says Works
None of this means the extra adult is a waste. The Education Endowment Foundation's review of the evidence puts the average gain from teaching assistants at around four extra months of progress over a year, and when they are running targeted work with individuals or small groups it rises to between four and six months. In primary schools it is slightly stronger again.But the gains come with conditions attached, and they are specific. Short sessions, twenty to fifty minutes. Three to five times a week. Kept up for eight to twenty weeks. A structured programme rather than general helping. And the assistant properly trained to deliver that programme, which in the successful studies meant anywhere from five to thirty hours of training.
The other condition is the one that matters most. The support has to add to the teaching, not replace it. Where researchers found negative effects, it was almost always because time with the assistant had come instead of time with the teacher.
So the question was never whether another adult helps. It is what that adult is doing, and whether your child is still getting the teacher.
The Adult Who Isn't There
There is a newer wrinkle, and it is the part most parents have no way of knowing about. In September this year, Rob Webster at the University of Greenwich published findings from a survey of more than 8,000 school support staff. Two thirds of teaching assistants had covered classes for absent teachers.When that happens, the support has to come from somewhere. Staff reported that what got dropped was classroom help, the one-to-one hours attached to a child's EHCP, curriculum interventions and therapy sessions. The hours exist on the plan and vanish in the week. No letter goes home about it.
It is not hard to see why schools do it. The NFER found last autumn that 77 per cent of secondary leaders and 74 per cent of primary leaders were struggling to recruit teaching assistants - harder, in primary, than recruiting teachers. School support staff earn roughly a third less per week than comparable workers elsewhere. We have built the main plank of SEND provision on the lowest-paid, least-trained, most easily reassigned people in the building.
What Is Actually Worth Asking
February's schools white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, promises a tiered model of support and more than £200 million for SEND training for all school staff from this September. Whether that money reaches teaching assistants in the form of real training on real programmes, rather than an afternoon in the hall, is the whole test.In the meantime, the useful conversation at parents' evening is not about the number of hours. It is three slightly different questions: who is actually teaching my child in maths, what happens in the sessions she is taken out for, and does the teacher plan them.
Most of us assume the adult beside our child is the protective thing, the bit we fought for. The evidence says the protective thing is the teacher, and the adult beside her is only worth having if she is doing something a teacher could not do in that moment anyway.
Sources & Further Reading