This is according to a recommendation from the Education Endowment Foundation’s updated guidance on teaching assistants. Published today, the guide gives school leaders practical recommendations to effectively deploy teaching assistants (TAs) in schools across the country.
As part of the updated guide, the EEF has undertaken a brand-new review of the evidence base, synthesizing the findings from over 52 different studies to provide five clear and evidence-informed recommendations on how to best utilise TAs to support attainment outcomes.
This update comes as the TA workforce continues to grow within the English education system. According to the most recent data, there are over 280,000 TAs across schools in England, a figure that has increased by 28% since 2011, when support staff data was first included in the school workforce census (1). Many TAs play a role in supporting the inclusion of pupils with SEND in mainstream schools. TAs are widely seen as vital in helping mainstream schools maintain inclusivity, as the number of pupils with SEND and complex needs continues to rise.
Making sure TAs are deployed effectively is also vital to supporting high quality teaching for all pupils, but particularly those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
The guide, which originally launched in 2015 and was last updated in November 2021, has proved popular with school leaders. In the last year alone, it has been accessed over 65,000 times on the EEF website (2).
The updated guide, which is now known as the ‘Deployment of Teaching Assistants Guidance Report’, focuses on five actionable recommendations. A new recommendation highlights the importance of engaging all staff and focuses on how school leaders can make sure all staff are on the same page about the role of TAs and how they can effectively support all pupils.
A separate recommendation focuses on the role that TAs can play in delivering structured one-to-one or small-group interventions like tutoring, while another focuses on how TAs can help develop pupils’ independence through powerful scaffolding techniques.
The guide includes detail within each recommendation to help school leaders support their implementation. For example, as part of the recommendation on scaffolding, there is a classroom example of how a TA may help scaffold learning for a struggling pupil in an English lesson as well as a visual scaffolding framework for leaders to draw on with their teacher and TA teams.
Alongside the updated guide, the EEF has also developed additional new resources to further support educators. These resources include a teacher-TA partnership tool to help establish ways of working between the two, helping inform their ongoing communication and decision making to support the learning of all pupils
Commenting on the updated resources, Emily Yeomans, co-Chief Executive at Education Endowment Foundation said:
NOTES TO EDITORS:
The updated guidance and resources will be available here from Wednesday 26 March 2025. If you would like to see an embargoed copy of the updated guidance before then, please contact grace.stokes@eefoundation.org.uk.
(1) Gov.uk School Workforce Data from 2024
(2) 65,452 views on the Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants Guide webpage from 9 March 2024 – 8 March 2025.