Schools are ditching the traditional teaching assistant role as a surge in pupils with special needs, dwindling budgets and rising private sector wages drive workforce innovation.
Two trusts are phasing out teaching assistants (TAs) almost entirely in their secondaries, with others also doing away with the age-old model of one-to-one classroom-based support.
Instead, schools are pioneering new teams of fewer, but upskilled learning mentors and coaches overseeing targeted interventions for small groups of pupils with additional needs.
A government study published on Friday found the roles and responsibilities of TAs have “increased significantly” in recent years.
Alongside the “traditional activities” of preparing resources and decorating classrooms, TAs now perform “a greater variety of tasks to support teaching and learning”, researchers said.
Teacher recruitment and workload woes, an explosion of students with SEND and a rise in social, emotional and mental health needs post-Covid are all driving the changes.
But low pay and limited career progression are driving TAs out of the classroom and into better-paid jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets. Meanwhile most teachers have not had training on how to deploy TAs effectively.
Leaders are now reinventing the role of TAs in the classroom. Schools Week investigates…
Need for SEND specialists
In 2011, England’s 221,500 TAs made up 25 per cent of the school workforce.
Their numbers have risen by over a quarter since then to 282,900 – and they now make up 29 per cent of the overall workforce.
Just over half of secondary school leaders were planning to recruit more TAs in the next year, the Department for Education-commissioned study found.
Nearly all of the heads surveyed, in May and June last year, said the main reason was due to an increase in pupils with SEND. Nearly a fifth of pupils nationally now have special needs.
But four in five found it difficult to hire TAs with specialist SEND skills. Three-quarters of heads also struggled more generally to recruit enough TAs, the study found.
United Learning, the country’s largest academy trust, is advocating for its secondary schools to replace TAs with learning coaches.
Sarah Horn, the trust’s secondary director of SEND, said each coach has a SEND specialism in an area such as autism or dyslexia.
Instead of the “old-school” one-on-one classroom support, the coaches have a roster of pupils linked to their specialism and will pop in and out of lessons to provide interventions or offer teachers tips on best practice.
“We wanted our students to thrive socially and have those independence and resilience skills to be able to learn themselves,” Horn added. “We found that potentially, with a TA in the past, that hadn’t worked.”
Five schools have embraced the new approach, with TAs supported to make the transition.
“We saw some of our TAs had a real passion in certain specialisms and we thought, why are we not tapping into this more?” Horn added.
‘You can’t have more TAs than children’
Turner Schools trust, in Kent, has replaced most of the TAs in its secondaries with learning mentors, who all also have a SEND specialism.
Each specialises in either communication and interaction; cognition and learning; social, emotional and mental health difficulties and sensory and/or physical need.
Trust CEO Seamus Murphy said roughly one in four students in its secondaries has some kind of additional need.
“We have 3,000 kids. If we were going down the teaching assistant model, we couldn’t have 800 TAs, could we? The country’s broke enough.
“We have fewer people, we pay less [overall], they’re better qualified. And responsibility lies with the teacher.”
Only half of TAs surveyed were satisfied with their opportunities to progress, with secondary schools even less satisfied, the DfE study found.
Murphy added: “It’s about creating this additional capacity within schools with people who have high status, high levels of expertise, and who work alongside teachers – rather than to teachers.”
It could also solve a retention problem. One in six surveyed TAs said they were considering leaving the profession within the next 12 months. The main reasons given were pay and limited opportunities to progress.
Hilary Spencer, CEO of Ambition Institute, said teachers and leaders have benefited in recent years from significant investment in their professional development, and now TAs “deserve high quality training too”.
‘TAs haven’t been well used’
The effectiveness of TAs has been hotly debated. Leaders “highly value” their support, regard them as “essential to the classroom” and think they have a significant impact on teacher workload and attendance, the DfE report found.
But a large study by the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff project in 2009 found classroom-based TAs actually had a negative impact on students with SEND. Pupils that got the most support actually made less progress.
Education Endowment Foundation research in 2021 found that targeted deployment of TAs, where they are trained to deliver interventions to small groups, led to pupils making five months’ additional progress.
Ruthie Jacobs, principal at Laureate Academy in Hemel Hempstead, run by Future Academies, said “historically, TAs haven’t been utilised well”.
She added: “I think there’s been a really heavy and unfair burden on them and expecting them to master the curriculum content in multiple subjects.”
At Future, TAs are upskilled to become experts in a specific area, such as numeracy, phonics or emotional regulation.
Anna-Maria O’Toole, the trust’s head of SEND and inclusion, said their approach allows support staff to make “targeted, measurable” interventions.
The DfE research stated that teachers and leaders across all settings had raised concerns about the so-called “Velcro model”, where a TA is constantly with a pupil, instead preferring a “helicopter approach” to encourage independent learning.
However, only a minority of teachers reported that they had received any training about how to deploy TAs effectively in the classroom, leaving them to “independently navigate the demarcation of teacher and TA responsibilities”.
And 56 per cent of TAs still spent most of their time on one-to-one targeted support for children with additional needs.
But what about pay?
Another key issue for TAs is pay. Of those considering quitting, 60 per cent said it was over low wages.
A National Foundation for Educational Research report last year found that nearly half of secondary schools felt the salary they were able to offer was the single biggest barrier to TA recruitment.
United Learning’s Horn said learning mentors would typically be paid a “few thousand” more than TAs due to their expertise and extra responsibilities. A rough salary range was £20,000 to £25,000.
Turner Schools did not say how much it pays learning mentors, but Murphy said their approach was also about “professionalising a group of staff who I think have been underserved by leaders for some time.”
But having fewer, better-trained people leads to savings. As it stands, a third of primary schools were expecting to slash TA numbers last year amid wider financial pressures.
Benedict Yue, chief financial officer at the 28-school River Learning Trust, said it would save £1 million by August 2025 after choosing not to replace 35 TAs who left over a two-year stretch. Instead, the trust will shift towards employing a team of inclusion specialists.
Katharine Walsh, the trust’s director of inclusion, said: “It’s not about the money we’re saving. What we’re trying to do is more strategically deploy resources to improve outcomes for children.”
They are working with schools on how they could deploy resources.
“It could be thinking about, instead of employing two to three TAs, employing an additional teacher to have smaller, flexible groups across your group,” Walsh added.
Jacobs said the TA role seems to have become “less popular”. But she added: “We should train everyone [in schools], and I hope that people would see it as a career where they can progress.”
