Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has undertaken or commissioned a study or review of the capacity and effectiveness of (a) school based and (b) local authority based educational support staff.

In 2019, the department commissioned research about the use and effects of teaching assistants in primary and secondary mainstream schools. The research was published in June 2019 and is available on the government’s website: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-deployment-of-teaching-assistants-in-schools.

The research explores models of deployment in a range of primary and secondary mainstream schools in England, including the factors that affect deployment and reasons for changes to deployment.

Schools have the freedom to make decisions about the recruitment, training, use and pay for teaching assistants, according to their own circumstances.