Teaching Assistants

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing this very important debate on the value of teaching assistants. Teaching assistants make up something like a quarter of the schools work force and carry out a huge range of responsibilities, supporting teachers and forming a crucial part of the modern education system. Any Member of Parliament who visits schools in his or her constituency will see the excellent work that teaching assistants do and the tremendous support they give to teaching staff. I have seen many schools in my constituency where they are doing a fantastic job in backing up and supporting the work of teachers. Behavioural levels, for example, have improved significantly as a result. Teaching assistants, however, feel that their work is poorly understood and undervalued. They are among the lowest paid in public services, and they are overwhelmingly women and part-time workers. They work hard for little reward, often dealing with the most challenging and difficult children in school. They are very much valued in their communities, as I have seen from my visits to schools.

According to the latest official figures for publicly funded schools in England, there are some 360,000 teaching assistants, representing 27.4% of the schools work force and 25.8% of the full-time education work force. Some 93% of teaching assistants are women, which is an indication of the skew. Some 87%—that is, 312,000 teaching assistants—work part time. The growth in the number of teaching assistants was due to the previous Labour Government’s initiative to raise standards in schools and tackle teacher work load. The teaching professions had a little unease on the introduction of teaching assistants, a little like how the police force felt about the introduction of police community support officers. There was a worry that teaching assistants would try to take on duties meant for teachers, in the same way that police officers worried that PCSOs would take positions. That has not been the case, however. Teaching assistants, as with PCSOs, have provided excellent back-up and support.

On pay and conditions, teaching assistants are some of the lowest paid in the country in the public services, as I have mentioned. Their rates, as the Minister knows, vary across the country and in different schools. They are often paid at the lower levels of local authority pay scales and are under a massively diverse range of contracts and conditions, which vary by authority and school. For example, in local authority schools, teaching assistants are employed by the authority or the school, usually on local authority terms and conditions, and are then deployed by schools. That arrangement frequently causes confusion between local authorities and schools on contracts of employment and employment conditions. That in itself would be bad enough, but the academies have control over staff pay and are not bound by the collective agreements of the National Joint Council for Local Government Services. Larger academy chains conduct their own pay negotiations, while the majority of stand-alone academies follow the national negotiations.

I am deeply concerned that the lack of a national framework for pay and job evaluation means that academies are frequently hiring teaching assistants on lower grades than are appropriate, depressing pay and assigning duties to teaching assistants that are outside their job descriptions. I will give some examples. A teaching assistant in north-east Lincolnshire said:

“I have been regraded from Teaching Assistant level 4 to level 2. I now have two contracts, one at level 2 and one at level 4 for two afternoons per week when I provide…cover.”

A teaching assistant from Plymouth said:

“I have to work one extra week a year with no extra remuneration.”

That cannot be right. For someone to work a week with no remuneration in the 21st century is appalling.

The previous Labour Government rightly recognised that something needed to be done on the shambolic nature of terms and conditions of employment for teaching assistants. Labour agreed to establish a new body: the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North referred. It comprised unions and employers and was created to set pay and employment conditions for the school support staff work force. It was put into statute in 2009, but was cancelled in 2010 by the current Secretary of State, who said that it did

“not fit well with the Government’s priorities for greater deregulation”—[Official Report, 28 October 2010; Vol. 721, c. 116WS.]

As a result, school support staff are still employed badly on low pay.

As my hon. Friend said earlier, there is now a severe threat to teaching assistants’ jobs. Teaching assistants feel that their contribution to education is poorly understood and undervalued. Government sources are suggesting that teaching assistant jobs will be put at further risk. A May 2013 report by the right-wing think-tank Reform, which has been closely linked with the Secretary of State and Conservative party policies, cited past research to argue that savings in schools spending should be found by dramatically reducing the number of teaching assistants and increasing class sizes. Reform claimed that teaching assistants had a

“negligible impact on pupil progress though some impact on teacher productivity”.

It recommended:

“Ministers should support schools that reduce numbers of teaching assistants and allow class sizes to rise.”

In June 2013, as referred to by my hon. Friend, the Daily Mail reported that the Treasury and the Department for Education

“are considering getting rid of the classroom assistants in attempt to save some of the £4 billion a year spent on them”,

and that the director of Reform had said that

“the money spent on teaching assistants would be far better spent on improving the quality of teachers.”

As someone who served, along with the Front-Bench spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), on the Bill Committee of the Education Act 2011, I saw that the Government intend to introduce teachers with no academic qualifications. We have a right-wing think-tank saying that

“the money spent on teaching assistants would be far better spent on improving the quality of teachers”,

but the Government are quite happy to employ unqualified teachers, which flies in the face of everything they have been saying.

The Institute of Education ran a project between 2003 and 2009 entitled “Deployment and impact of support staff”. One of its researchers said in The Guardian in early 2014:

“TAs can only be as effective as teachers enable them to be and they shouldn’t have to mind-read. Think carefully about TAs’ contribution to learning and communicate your intentions to them. Inform them of the skills or knowledge the students they support should be developing, and what learning you want them to achieve by the end of the lesson…TAs can have a potentially transformative impact on learning by making small adjustments to their practice. A growing number of schools are reaping the benefits of changing the nature of TAs’ interactions with students”.

The original Institute of Education research found that support staff

“can have a positive effect on teaching and teacher workloads and job satisfaction. We can also say from the systematic observation results that support staff presence leads to pupils being better behaved in the sense that there is less dealing with negative behaviour, and there is more pupil classroom engagement in the sense that pupils are more on-task and less off-task.”

Reform’s ideological targeting of teaching assistants is not supported by academic evidence and does not fit with the reality of the modern school system. Even Reform acknowledged that cutting teaching assistants would mean larger class sizes, which cannot be good. Our pupils deserve better than that. I urge the Government and the Minister to rethink how they view and value teaching assistants. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North said, Ofsted has stated that teaching assistants

“are sensitive to pupils’ needs and offer good support and guidance to those who need extra help. Consequently, disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs achieve as well as their classmates and sometimes better”.

That can only be good for children. Teaching assistants are an essential part of their development.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

No, I do not have that assessment at this stage.

In 2013, the Department published a review of efficiency in the school system showing that the differences in the impact of TAs on attainment can be explained largely by how individual schools choose to deploy them. That is supported by the recent report from the Education Endowment Foundation, which showed that TAs can improve literacy and numeracy skills when deployed well and suggested that when used to support specific pupils in small groups or through structured interventions, TAs can be effective at improving attainment.

My main point of contention with the speeches made by Opposition Members is about how to improve attainment. The Government do not believe that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. We believe in a school-led system. As the hon. Members who are on the Education Committee will be well aware from Andreas Schleicher’s evidence to the Committee recently, international statistics suggest that a combination of autonomy and accountability achieves the best results for schools. When head teachers are given the power to make decisions about how to deploy staff in their schools, create an effective team, develop that team and manage talent, but are held to account through rigorous systems of inspection and external accountability, that leads to the best results, which is why we are reluctant to dictate to schools how to deploy teaching assistants or impose rigid boundaries about what teaching assistants can and cannot do. We know that there are different types of schools with different students, and there might be different factors in different areas of the country, so we are reluctant to create a one-size-fits-all policy.

That is my main point of difference from Opposition Members. I certainly do not disagree about the value of teaching assistants—the evidence shows that they are an important part of our education system—but we may disagree about the best way to ensure that schools deploy teaching assistants to students’ benefit.

[Mark Hendrick]

The Minister is giving a positive picture of the role of teaching assistants and is making the point that the Government do not think it a good idea to be too prescriptive about how teaching assistants are used; those considerations are best made locally. However, can she say a little about how she feels about low pay? As I said in my contribution, low pay is a problem for teaching assistants. We obviously value the work that they do, but in doing so, should we not see that they are properly remunerated and not just treated as cheap labour?

[Elizabeth Truss]

The evidence from the EEF suggests that teaching assistants who are properly remunerated and have a clear training structure achieve more, and that is something the head teacher ought to be taking into account.

In view of the evidence, we know that more can be done to help schools ensure that their TAs have a rewarding career and make an even greater contribution and impact in schools. We have been gathering evidence from teaching schools, academy chains and other key stakeholders on what good deployment and support for TAs looks like in our best schools.

We know that successful senior leaders deploy TAs based on their school’s particular needs and that different deployment models can work in the right circumstances. However, underpinning those models is a number of principles that good schools apply universally in deploying TAs. Those include employing suitably qualified TAs. We know that the TA’s level of general qualifications and skills—for example, their literacy and numeracy skills—can vary, and it is important that schools ensure that the qualifications, skills and backgrounds of their TAs are sufficiently robust and match the specific needs of the school.

We know that it is important that TAs are deployed according to their skills and expertise. TAs are employed in a variety of roles in schools, from providing administrative support for teachers to assisting with classroom and SEN teaching, and we have seen that good schools have a very clear structure and description of those roles. It is also important that schools are continually reviewing the deployment of TAs to ensure that they are achieving the stated objectives and are reviewing matters when those objectives have been achieved.

It is important to provide joint preparation and planning time for TAs and teachers to establish clear lesson outcomes and goals, which is a point made by the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson). Planning and preparation time are of course vital for teachers and teaching assistants to get the best out of their lessons. One thing that we are working on in the new maths hubs that the Government are establishing across the country is looking at best practice from overseas on organising the planning and preparation for lessons. However, in a school-led system, that ultimately has to be led by schools, rather than by the Government saying, “This is what we want you to do on a national basis.” I think that Opposition Members and I agree on the outcomes that we want to see; the question mark is over exactly how to achieve them. It is really essential for teaching assistants to understand the targets for pupils and to be trained in assessing pupil progress.