It’s not been an easy few years for teaching assistants. In 2010, funding for training Higher Level Teaching Assistants was scrapped, along with plans for national pay and conditions in England with the abolition of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body.
Furthermore, cherry-picked comments from research about inappropriate deployment of teaching assistants has been used to justify redundancies. Such comments have also undermined the professional standing of teaching assistants and eclipsed the good practice that exists in the majority of schools.
In April this year, the education secretary asked the School Teachers’ Review Body to consider scrapping the 24 tasks that teachers currently don’t have to carry out, which would have a knock-on effect on teaching assistant jobs. Then in June, national press reported that the Treasury and the Department for Education were considering phasing out teaching assistants in an attempt to save around £4 billion a year.
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