Am I the only edublogger out there subject to the Cassandra Effect? I’ve raised the issue recently about the misuse and doubtful value of classroom assistants a number of times here and woke up this morning to reports about research by Professor Merren Hutchings from London Metropolitan University confirming my worst fears, certainly in secondary schools. Her research reveals just how long and how often many children are sitting in classrooms without a professional teacher teaching them.

I left teaching some years before the classroom assistant emerged so I thought it would be only reasonable to give some thought to what one might do, or how I might have used one if they had been available. Apart from purely practical, mundane things like handing out books or collecting them in, and working one-to-one with children once they were carrying out an individual task, I could not think of a single worthwhile activity for a classroom assistant in any English class I ever taught. And even the one-to-one work would be pretty worthless unless they were educated to at least A level at English.

The entire dynamic of a great lesson (from the child’s point of view) depends on the relationship you establish with the class and children you are teaching and having an assistant there makes them part of your audience too, with the additional burden that they aren’t children.

I won’t repeat things I’ve written before about this, but if ever there was an example of why politics should be taken out of education, the origin and rise of the classroom assistant must be it.