Teaching assistants are under-utilised, under-appreciated and have the potential to be a a hugely positive influence in schools. says academic Rob Webster
“If we said, ‘On Monday, when you go back to school, there will be no teaching assistants (TAs)’, I doubt very much schools would make it to the end of the week,” says Rob Webster, an academic at the UCL Institute of Education (IoE). “TAs are the mortar in the brickwork.”
Webster heads up the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants initiative for the UCL Centre for Inclusive Education and is one of the country’s leading researchers into the role of TAs.
Speaking on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast, he talks about how the role of TAs has been underappreciated and largely ignored by the government.
“You would struggle to find a speech, or a substantive bit of a speech, by an education minister that deals with support staff, or specifically teaching assistants,” he explains. “That is a curiosity when you consider the numbers: there are around 390,000 people working in schools as a teaching assistant or similar. It is a lot of people – and it is estimated it costs the system £5 billion per year. So why would successive governments not have anything to say about them?”
