Tyres not Quite Squealing...Yet.
A few weeks ago I posted a piece about teaching assistants and their doubtful value after being told at a local authority meeting in London that the authority concerned was planning for the classroom workforce in their secondary schools to contain less than 25% qualified teachers in the next two years.
At the time I predicted a U-turn on teaching assistants, 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.
At the BERA conference in Manchester this week, IoE researchers led by Professor Peter Blatchford will show how children supported by classroom assistants do worse than those who aren’t. Their research, The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project surveyed 20,000 teachers and analysed the help received by more than 8,000 pupils in 153 schools, and consequently deserves to be taken very seriously.
Well the tyres aren’t quite squealing but they ought to be in the face of such obvious evidence that if you give a difficult or struggling child a babysitter instead of a teacher: they learn precious little that has anything to do with their curriculum.
When I was discussing this a few weeks ago with some colleagues I was working with at the local authority concerned, an antipodean who had only recently left teaching described the scheme as English language teaching on the cheap. Only half joking she described classroom assistants she had worked with who were little better than an extra pupil, putting their hand up in class to ask, “Which page are we on?” Yet New Labour have blithely expanded the number of classroom assistants to 322, 500.
I think it’s actually disingenuous of the report to qualify its criticism by defending the classroom assistants as hard working and sincere, and laying the blame on a lack of training for teachers on how to deploy assistants. The origin of the role came about as a classic let’s deal with the symptom, not the cure response. I can just imagine the dim spark at the then Department who dreamed up the idea saying, “We can get disruptive kids out of the classroom; employ lots of well meaning mums and give their families a second income; take some of the misbehaviour heat off teachers and win back their votes…it’s not just a win/win, it’s a win, win, win!”
What they should have done, is faced up to the profoundly anti-education culture that numerous children bring with them to school and which undermines many teachers’ best efforts, re-empower schools and teachers to exert meaningful discipline over children and parents, and create classrooms in which learning is a prized noun and not a paltry participle.
The report concludes that, It would seem appropriate to argue that all pupils should get at least the same amount of a teacher's time, and, indeed, that those in most need are most likely to benefit from more, not less. To which I would only add the words academically qualified, subject experts.
Joe Nutt
4 Comments
Reader Comments (4)
We should not be surprised that classroom assistants have proved unequal to this task. No one could do it. And it doesn't take a lot of imagination (or experience) to understand why this role is actually counter-productive: assistants end up virtually doing pupils' work for them. The unholy compact is that the kid keeps reasonably quiet if the TA does his work.
This shouldn't be used as a blanket argument against classroom assistants, but rather against the way they are used. Given the right brief and the right tools, they can be extremely useful. Southampton and Gloucestershire have just completed trials of our "Bear Necessities" phonics programme, which is designed to be used for 10 minutes each day on an individual basis. It is designed for use by non-specialists--some of our customers report that dinner ladies, parent volunteers, and even Duke of Edinburgh award pupils have used it to very good effect.
Learning to decode print is a simple mechanical task, but children with poor visual memory and/or working memory can need very substantial amounts of repetition before reading becomes effortless and automatic, as it is for normal skilled readers. To be effective, instruction must happen every school day; otherwise, so much is forgotten between lessons that little progress is made. Massed practice of new spelling patterns must be followed by distributed practice over a longer period; without a well-designed programme, it's almost impossible to do this. As SEN children vary so much in the degree of their learning difficulties, it is now recognised that individual instruction is a more effective use of teaching time.
We struggled with all of these factors--using the best commercial programmes available--for ten years, until we decided to write our own materials. Our private practice gave us ample scope for trying out new ideas, and refining them to the point where we had programmes suitable for all children. But most importantly, they had to be simple enough so that anyone could use them.
In fact, Gloucestershire ed psychs have found that our materials are just as effective in the hands of TAs as teachers. This is just as well, because in the great majority of our schools, it is TAs who use them.
The trials demonstrated that the great majority of slow readers in Year 1 can catch up without the need for specialist intervention. The total amount of teaching time per child was about 16 hours--if we assume that TAs are paid around £10 per hour, the total cost of the intervention--including our book--was £175. By contrast, Reading Recovery (the Government's favoured programme used in Every Child A Reader) costs over £5,000 per pupil.
Common sense should tell us that there is just as wide a variety of ability amongst TAs as of teachers. At the primary level, differences in subject knowledge is less important than in secondary school--and it is also unimportant when teaching mechanical skills like decoding, spelling and number bonds. In these cases, teaching is necessarily repetitive, and if anything, the qualified teacher is at a disadvantage. ITT for infant teachers tends to instill a prejudice against anything smacking of rote-learning or direct instruction--both of which are essential for children with any kind of memory problems.
As usual, I was guilty as you pointed out, of a very secondary school bias in this post and I do appreciate the points you made about primary school children and literacy.
I wonder if the research will produce any sensible change?