Teachers have formal and well-established training routes. The ITTECF ‘sets out what trainee and early career teachers need to know, and know how to do’. Time is set aside for ongoing CPD throughout a teacher’s career.
Teaching Assistants (TAs) have a less level playing field. In the absence of formal training routes when TAs start their career, or protected time for ongoing development throughout their career, decisions around developing TAs lie with school leaders.
How leaders develop their TA workforce to work effectively alongside teachers and ‘enable all pupils to access high quality teaching’, recommendation one of the EEF’s updated Deployment of Teaching Assistants guidance report, feels key in maximising the impact of these crucial colleagues.
A well-defined partnership
The evidence clearly points towards TAs having greatest impact when there is clarity around their role. Leaving it to TAs to work out what they should be doing in class, however skilled they are, will always be less impactful than a well-defined TA-teacher partnership. This should include establishing agreed ways of working and committing to ongoing, open dialogue about how to enable access to high-quality teaching.
In many schools, TAs already deliver the benefits that an additional adult can bring in supporting pupils to access high-quality teaching. Some of the ways this happens are set out in the EEF’s new tool, ‘Effective Teacher-Teaching Assistant partnerships’, released alongside the updated guidance report.
This tool can be used to help establish, for example, the TA’s role in:
- supporting pupils’ attention and focus during the teacher’s instruction,
- positively reinforcing good behaviour,
- modelling how pupils might use (or reduce their dependence on) a scaffold.
This tool can be used to establish ways of working and to ensure a tight focus on teaching and learning.
The start of a discussion
Agreeing a set of working practices is a useful starting point, but it needs to be sustained.
Things change in a class – new pupils may arrive, the level of curriculum challenge may increase or established routines may start to lose their impact.
These elements can compromise the success of a lesson – pupils may get less individual attention, may struggle more in their learning or may become dysregulated.
These challenges may require a rethink for both the teacher and TA. They may affect which pupils get more attention from a TA, which pupils need additional group intervention from their teacher or how lessons will start and finish.
A culture of ongoing, open dialogue and practice that adapts accordingly needs school leadership support.
Respectful partnerships
A spirit of respectful partnership and a culture of regular discussion are clearly key if this successful partnership is to be sustained. That’s likely to mean asking:
- How can open, ongoing dialogue around learning outcomes and pupil progress be sustained, to ensure day-to-day preparedness?
- What opportunities can be found to reflect more deeply on how the teacher-TA partnership is supporting pupils? Returning to the ‘effective partnerships’ tool might support this discussion.