It’s Tuesday afternoon with my bottom set year 9s, and one voice continuously talks over me as I try to teach. I focus my gaze on the perpetrator, Andrea, but I do not administer the customary telling-off. Why? Because she’s a teaching assistant (TA).
When I ask for silence, she engages a group of children in discussion. As I write notes on the board, she (wrongly) questions some of the facts and asks whether my spelling is definitely right. Then she suggests an alternative method to a calculation, which the children love because it looks easier, but is conceptually inaccurate. I am beginning to feel like the bad guy in my own classroom.
This has been going on for a long time, and it’s ruining my lessons. I’ve tried to have an honest conversation with her, but she always thinks she knows best. And it’s hard for me; I am not her manager and she is not accountable to me.
I know it isn’t always this way. I’ve worked with plenty of TAs who are experts in their area of special educational needs (SEN), conscientious about communication and excellent at taking the initiative. I’ve seen a primary TA take an entire class full-time while the teacher was on maternity leave; I’ve seen TAs routinely left to teach classes with absolutely no cover work; and I’ve had some of the best teaching feedback of my career from the eagle-eyed among them.
But it all seems very hit-and-miss; Andrea isn’t the only one who has led my students in the wrong direction. Some TAs do far too much for pupils – underlining their work, whispering what to write or even writing it for them. I remember starting one lesson with a mental arithmetic test, telling the children to sit down and work in silence, only for a TA to go over and explain how to complete the questions to a small group. A TA was absent from my class recently and the boy she normally works with said it was nice to “be on my own to get on with things”.
The problem is partly that communication between teachers and TAs is non-existent. The school hierarchy means that the two groups are usually kept apart, with meetings often held separately. TAs aren’t always privy to the issues we are facing, or the conversations we have about how to deal with everyday classroom problems.
In fact, TAs only seem to be told the minimum they need to know – usually timetabling and some SEN information about pupils. For everything else, they are expected to look up the relevant information before each lesson or go and find the teacher for clarification. But I’m lucky if I manage to snatch a hurried conversation with my TAs once a week – and I only manage that because I try hard to make time for these crucial dialogues.
There’s so much more that schools could do – timetabling weekly meetings, making sure that TAs are at staff briefings, and involving teachers in the line management of TAs, for starters. If it was clear that Andrea was accountable to me for her actions, and there were channels for our communication, the problems I am having with her could have been dealt with or passed to my line manager much earlier on. As it stands, the situation has gone so far that I don’t know how to deal with it.
There needs to be far more investment in TAs’ skills too. Andrea is not nasty or difficult – she just lacks the training to be an asset in the classroom. Even higher-level teaching assistants (HLTAs) can be out of their depth with classroom basics. They will often just shout at children, rather than managing behaviour in a positive way with rewards and sanctions, warnings and stepped consequences. They don’t seem to understand that empty threats are the nemesis of good behaviour management.
I know it’s not an easy job, especially without good communication or much training. TAs in secondary schools can work with 10 or 20 different teachers in one week – all expecting different things, all prone to good and bad days. Many TAs work across numerous subjects, and even if they are linked to a single department, they can be dealing with huge variations in content from key stage 3 to GCSE and A-level. It’s even trickier in primary, where TAs and HLTAs are now routinely expected to take classes.
But feel sorry for them though I do, enjoy their company as I do, and feel guilty for saying this as I do – the majority of the time, TAs add nothing to my lessons.
Teaching is a uniquely stressful job and we are struggling to recruit and retain. If we could make it so that our TAs were consistently trained and managed well enough to really contribute to schools, this could be part of the solution. TAs could be mentors and role models to young people, if only we could make it easier for them to do their jobs well.
