The only thing I have yet to hear said about the government’s abrupt decision to abandon the national strategies for literacy and numeracy in primary schools is that maybe, just maybe...it is because they have actually worked! The entire approach to basic literacy and numeracy before they were introduced was just so haphazard and chaotic. I remember in those dark and distant days hearing an English adviser for one of the largest local authorities in the UK no less, speaking at a conference. She showed examples of a pupil’s creative writing which made minimal if any sense, was utterly illegible and whichever way you cut it, failed the basic test of written language, to communicate. Yet nonetheless, she confidently asserted that she could understand what the child was trying to write and therefore awarded her such and such positive marks.

I think on that occasion my jaw must have rebounded off the carpet because it suffered a similar fate recently. At a meeting with a local authority, I learned that in three years time they fully expect that less than 25% of all the people working in their secondary school classrooms will be qualified teachers. At the moment a little over 50% are not qualified teachers but they are busy planning for it to be under a quarter.

Now I know from my experience in the past that the phrase teaching assistant covers a multitude of sins and sinners. There are some extremely able adults doing this job, who given other life circumstances would probably have trained as teachers, but there are also some who are little more than mumsy babysitters. I saw lots of these when I worked for Teach First. Kindly souls whose job was to walk around the school all day virtually welded to some appallingly disruptive teenager, often ending up actually doing the work for them. I am also convinced that their value in schools is directly in proportion to a child’s age. The younger the better.

When Estelle Morris introduced teaching assistants to UK schools in 2003, it was never intended that they would take lessons, or run classes on their own. In advice produced by the department about this, the farthest they could go was: Where the teacher is satisfied that the TA is sufficiently confident and accomplished the TA can address the whole class for a time according to plans made in advance with the teacher. Now I have no doubt at all that as I write, there are classrooms in secondary schools all over the UK, where the only adult present is a TA. I think the precise term is mission creep.

So my educated guess, is that it won’t be long before we hear the sound of DCSF tyres squealing under the stress of another U-turn, this time on the effect and value of teaching assistants. Maybe next week’s white paper?