16 Of 21 Results Went The Wrong Way For Teaching Assistants

This is the education commute. Both voices on this show are synthesized. The judgment isn't. So it is nine point zero four a .m. on a Tuesday and you are kneeling by the exact same desk you knelt by yesterday. Right. It's the third seat from the radiator. And honestly, in every practical sense, because you are the teaching assistant, that is your seat, too. Yeah, you've been, you know, with. this one specific trial since September. If you look at his plan, the document mandates 12 hours of support a week.

Exactly. And 11 of those hours are you. Right, because you are the one sitting in that third seat from the radiator day in and day out. You know things about him that absolutely no document knows. Oh, for sure. Like, you know that he physically cannot start writing his ideas down until he has spoken the entire sentence out loud to you first. Yeah, or you know that Tuesdays, right after his swimming lesson, are just a complete write -off for him. Yeah, his energy is just totally gone by then.

And you also know that his reading intervention actually works much better out in the busy corridor than it does in the quiet, designated intervention room. Which is funny, right, because the intervention room smells faintly of a dentist's office. Right. And that specific smell distracts him to the point of basically shutting down. But, you know, none of that nuance, none of that vital context is actually written down anywhere on his official plan. It just lives inside you. Yeah. So at 9 .04 AM, the teacher stands at the front and starts the whole class input, and they do what everyone in the room has silently agreed to do without ever actually holding a meeting to agree on it.

Which is what? The teacher directs their instruction to the wider room, and they leave that struggling child entirely to you. Yeah. And here's the paradox. of that 9 .04 AM moment. I mean, this arrangement is happening with the absolute best of intentions. Oh, absolutely. The classroom teacher's intentions, the school leadership's intentions, and, you know, your intentions. Everyone genuinely wants to help this child succeed. But today... We are unpacking what two decades of rigorous research says about that exact arrangement. And we're going to be guided by a major report from the Education Endowment Foundation.

Right. And to be completely transparent about our perspectives today, I am sitting in the TA's chair. Like, I'm looking at this as the person delivering those 11 of 12 hours. Yeah. Because it is about time somebody finally asked what this system looks like from the radiator seat. I completely agree. And I'm sitting in the Isinco, pronounced Sinco chair. I'm looking at this as the person who writes the provision map that puts TAs exactly where they are. The one designing the map. Exactly. The core document we are using to guide this discussion is the Education Endowment Foundation Report, making best use of teaching assistants.

Right. But before we can even begin to talk about solutions or recommendations, we need to understand the sheer scale of TA deployment. We need to look at the autopsy of the current system. Okay. From your perspective on the ground, I want you to estimate what we actually spend on teaching assistants nationally per year. Like, what is the financial and structural scale of this workforce? Well, the numbers are, they're staggering. We spend 4 .4 billion pounds a year. Wow. That's a lot. Yeah, and according to the report's own figures, that represents 13 % of the entire education budget.

13 %? Yes. And in terms of actual human beings in the building, TAs now make up 35 % of the primary workforce and 14 % of the secondary workforce. That is massive. And that workforce hasn't just grown, it has actually more than trebled since the year 2000. Trebled. And, you know, that massive growth wasn't an accident. It was heavily driven by national workload deals and major inclusion policies. Exactly. Over the last 20 years, TAs essentially became the primary mechanism for how inclusion happens inside a mainstream classroom.

Yeah, the go -to solution. But the report identifies a systemic issue with how that evolved. It states that schools experience a drift, and that is the report's specific word. Drift, right. Yeah, a drift with the best of intentions into using TAs as an informal teaching resource for the pupils who are in the most need. Okay, so think about it like a hospital. Imagine a hospital where the head consultant only ever treats the patients with a mild cough. Okay. And while that's happening, the patients in critical condition, the ones who need the most advanced specialized care are exclusively assigned to the first year interns.

Wow. Yeah, putting it like that, it sounds completely reckless. It really does. Yet structurally, that is the exact drift we allowed in our classrooms. We quietly reassigned the most vulnerable children from the fully qualified classroom teacher to the least qualified adult in the room. Hearing it framed as a hospital makes the structural flaw impossible to ignore, honestly. To truly understand the fallout of that drift, we have to look at the deployment data. Right. Yeah, because the largest and most detailed study ever done on TA Impact is the Deployment Impact of Support Staff project, or the DIS project.

And when did that run? That ran from 2003 to 2008. They tracked 8 ,200 pupils across English, Maths, and Science. Okay, that's a huge sample site. It is. They looked at seven different age groups over an entire academic year. And crucially, they controlled for all other variables. Right. So comparing apples to apples. Exactly. They accounted for prior attainment, special educational needs, status, and income levels. So when they crunched all that data across those control variables, they landed on 21 distinct results regarding pupil progress. Yeah. And out of those 21 results, 16 went in a negative direction.

Yeah. Positive effects, zero, not in one single subject. not in one single year group. It's tough to hear. The devastating conclusion of the DIS project was that the pupils receiving the most TA support actually made less progress than similar pupils who receive little or no support. Okay, we have to stop right there and be incredibly clear about what that means because the emotional weight of that finding for a TA is just crushing. No, it really is. That study is not an autopsy of the people doing the job.

The children were not failed by the person kneeling next to them at the radiator. No, absolutely not. They were failed by the arrangement where that kneeling replaced the teacher. This is not a study of what TAs do. It is an indictment of what the system does with TAs. Yeah, and the report draws that exact same hard line. The failure is systemic. And it highlights an even more uncomfortable truth. Which is? The negative impact was most marked for pupils with the highest levels of SEN. Because they get the most of that specific support.

Exactly. That happens because they are the exact students who get the most of the support and they end up separated from the classroom instruction. Separated from the teacher's expertise. Right, and separated from their peers. And this isn't just one isolated study either. We see the same pattern in the Tennessee STAR study in the U .S. Right. That one found no attainment benefit from classroom aids in the early grades. We see it in other UK studies where pupils with SEN assigned to TAs made less progress than their unsupported peers.

And didn't those follow -up studies go all the way up to What was it, 2017? Yeah, through to 2017. They found that despite the DISS project being published, the actual deployment of TAs in classrooms hadn't substantially changed. OK, well, let me challenge the focus on pure attainment data for a second, because school is about more than just academic scores. True. What about confidence? What about behavior? What about a child's actual willingness to attempt a task? Right, the softer skills. Yeah, because teachers consistently report that TA support is absolutely crucial for keeping a child regulated and motivated.

Well, the DIS project actually anticipated that argument. They didn't just measure test scores. They also measured approaches to learning across eight different scales to see if those soft skills were improving. And what did they find? They found no clear win there either. In fact, they found evidence of a psychological phenomenon called the velcro effect. The velcro effect. Yeah, this is where the constant close proximity of an adult actually increases a child's dependency. Ah, so the help essentially becomes the habit. Yes, exactly. The child learns to sit and wait for the adult to initiate the cognitive work.

The micro interactions really tell the story. Like what? Well, the pencil hovers until the TA taps the paper. The child looks up searching for a nod of approval before attempting the next math problem. Yeah, I've seen that a thousand times. Right. They aren't building resilience. They're being trained to wait for a prompt. And if we look at the structural realities of the staff room, it is obvious why that happens. Why do you think that is? In nursery and primary settings, 90 % of TAs are part -time.

90 %? Yeah, 90%. Compare that to teachers, where it's only 27%. Everyone agrees that TAs desperately need liaison time with the teacher to plan and understand the lessons goal. Of course. But that liaison time somehow has to magically fit inside working hours that usually end abruptly at 3 by 5 p .m. Right. Which means it never happens organically. It has to be meticulously designed by leadership and mostly it just isn't. TAs are handed the hardest most complex children in the building. With the least amount of background info.

Exactly. We are given the least amount of background information. We frequently find out what the lesson actually is at the exact same moment the class does. That's so frustrating. We have no planning time, no feedback loop, and we are paid to the minute. I mean, if a qualified teacher was deployed like that... five different lessons a day, zero preparation time, zero liaison. You wouldn't blame the teacher when the kids didn't progress. No, you definitely wouldn't. You would blame the broken timetable. Yeah. And sitting in the Es Endanco pronounced Senco chair, I, you know, I have to own my part in that broken timetable.

I write the provision map. Right. I write the document that says a child gets 12 hours of TA support. And then I categorize that as specialized provision. Because that's what the system demands. Exactly. But assigning hours to a child is just an administrative input. The hard truth of this research is that nobody has ever closed a complex learning gap with a pure input. The failure rests on the design of the maps, and I am the one designing the maps. So now that we understand why the current model is failing, we really need to look at what the evidence says actually works.

Right. If sitting glued to a child in the classroom creates that Velcro effect, what is the alternative deployment? So the strongest finding in the entire Education Endowment Foundation report shifts the TA away from informal classroom support and toward delivering structured interventions. OK, like out of the main class? Yeah, either one -to -one or in a small group. And when this is done right, it yields a highly consistent impact of three to four additional months progress over an academic year. That's substantial. It is. In research terms, that's an effect size of 0 .

2 to 0 .3. To put that in perspective for educational research, A field where moving the needle even slightly is incredibly difficult. An effect size of .2 is not just a rounding error. Right. It is a highly significant, noticeable leap in a child's trajectory. But that leap doesn't happen just by moving a TA from a classroom desk to a random table in the hallway, surely? No, no, no. The report lays out strict, non -negotiable conditions for those interventions. What kind of conditions? Well, the anatomy of a successful intervention is very specific.

The sessions need to be brief and regular between 20 to 50 minutes and running three to five times a week. And it needs to be sustained for eight to 20 weeks. That makes sense. Consistency is key. Exactly. But the absolute bedrock condition is the training. The TA delivering the intervention must receive five to thirty hours of training per specific intervention. Wow, per intervention. Yeah, handing a TA a photocopied leaflet and pointing them to an empty room is not training. Definitely isn't. It has to be an evidence program with clear objectives followed faithfully with ongoing assessment to track actual progress.

You know, this creates a fascinating paradox. The exact same teaching assistant can show negative effects on a child's progress in an unsupported chaotic classroom environment. Right. But that same person given the right structure, the right training and a clear program drives phenomenal positive effects in an intervention. Yeah, it's amazing. It's the exact same 10 pounds of the school budget, but it is spent twice as well simply by changing the scaffolding around the adult. That is such a good way to put it. But that brings us to a massive logistical hurdle, which is TAs can't spend their entire day in the corridor running interventions.

They still spend a huge portion of their time inside the classroom. So how do we fix that environment? Right. Well, the report outlines four practical rules for classroom deployment. The first rule directly attacks the hospital intern problem we talked about earlier. Okay, rule one. TAs must add value to the teacher, never replace them. The teacher retains ultimate responsibility for every child. The struggling pupils must get just as much direct high -quality teacher time as the highest attainers in the room. I love that. And that leads directly into the second rule, which is really the antidote to the Velcro effect.

What's rule two? It's least hope first. This means giving the child the absolute smallest prompt possible, and then giving them wait time. Ah, wait time. Yeah, and from a TA's perspective on the ground, I cannot overstate how counter -instinctive this feels. I can imagine. When your job title literally has the word assistant in it, and you are sitting next to a child with a blank worksheet, ensuring that worksheet gets filled in feels like your entire purpose. Right, you want to fix it for them. Exactly. Holding back, giving a tiny visual cue, and then just watching a child sit in the struggle for five full seconds feels like you are failing at your job.

Yeah, it feels unnatural. But the evidence shifts the entire goalpost. Finishing the worksheet isn't the job. Building the child's independent ownership of the learning is the job. That's powerful. But a TA can't confidently step back and offer the least help if they don't actually know what the specific learning goal of the lesson is. Exactly, which forces us to look at the third rule. Right. Rule three is preparation. TAs need the need -to -knows before a lesson begins. They need to know the specific skills being taught, the desired outcomes, and what kind of feedback they should be giving.

And as a Senko pronounced Senko, I know how agonizing timetabling is. Finding an extra 15 minutes for liaison time feels like trying to find an extra day in the week. It really does. But it requires looking at the school day differently. It means deliberately utilizing assembly times. So a TA isn't just standing at the back of the hall monitoring behavior, but is instead looking at the upcoming week's planning. Using the time smarter. Yeah, it means adjusting start and finish times to create shared planning windows. And if you manage to carve out that preparation time, you can finally tackle the fourth rule.

which is explicit connections. Explicit connections. Yeah, you have to ensure that pupils realize the intervention they are doing out in the corridor connects directly to the skills they need inside the classroom. Yes, this is a constant frustration in special educational needs. A child can master a phonics program beautifully in the corridor with a TA. Oh yeah! And then completely fail to use those same decoding skills during the whole class reading lesson. It happens all the time. It's like teaching a teenager the mechanics of driving in an empty, quiet parking lot and then tossing them the keys on a busy six -lane highway during rush hour and being shocked when they freeze up.

That is a perfect analogy, and the report is very blunt on this point. What does it say? Do not assume that pupils will make these cognitive links on their own. The adults have to make the connection explicit. The teacher needs to know what happened in the corridor so they can cue the child to use that exact skill on the highway. Okay, so if we take all of this evidence, the systemic drift, the Velcro effect, the success of structured interventions, and the four classroom rules, and we reimagine the whole system, what does a functioning school actually look like?

Well, in a primary setting, it looks like a swap. Instead of the TA taking the struggling group to a table at the back, the qualified teacher takes the guided reading group with the strugglers. Oh, wow. Yeah. Meanwhile, the TA circulates around the rest of the room, utilizing least help first with the wider class. The neediest kids get the most qualified adult. That makes so much sense. And as a secondary setting, an intervention becomes a real formal timetabled slot. Right. It looks like 25 minutes, four mornings a week, for 10 weeks.

run by one fully trained TA using one evidence program with actual materials. It is not just throwing a TA and a kid together during period five when we can find an empty room. Exactly. And in a specialist setting where TAs often outnumber the teachers and the behavioral and medical stakes are incredibly high, the exact same rules translate up. How so? The provision plan explicitly states what the adult is supposed to do, not just who they're supposed to sit near. The need to knows happen daily. Yeah.

And crucially, all of that deep TA knowledge gets formalized. The knowledge that usually just stays with the TA. Right. Knowing that a child needs to speak a sentence before they write it, knowing about the exhaustion of swimming Tuesdays, knowing the intervention room smells like the dentist. Yeah. All of that gets written into the plan instead of just living invisibly in one person's head. So let's go back to 9 .04 AM on a Tuesday. The same desk, same child, but this time the architecture of the room is different.

Oh, OK. This morning, the teacher opens the whole class input scanning right at his table because the provision map has been rewritten and it now clearly states that the teacher owns his progress too. And you, the TA. You are not kneeling by the radiator anymore. Right. You are standing two desks away. You have a prompt card ready. You are counting wait time in your head, actively giving the least help first, letting him grapple with the start of the task. Yeah. And then at 10 30 a .

m. you leave the room to run the structured reading program, the program you have actually received 15 hours of training on. Yes. And you run it in the corridor. Why? Because you finally told the Essie and co pronounced Senco that the intervention room smells like a dentist. And this time somebody actually wrote it down. That challenge is getting the absolute best of both adults now. And let's be honest, that was always the entire point of having two adults in the room in the first place. So we have two practical challenges for you.

takeaway from this episode. First, tomorrow at break, ask whoever is standing next to you by the kettle, and ask them kindly, not as an accusation. Good caveat. Ask them, who actually planned with a TA this week? And I don't mean a hasty handover whispered at the door as the kids walk in. I mean, who sat down, looked at the learning outcomes, and planned? Yeah. And if you are the TA standing by the kettle, What is the one crucial thing you know about a child's learning habits that isn't written down anywhere?

Maybe today is the day you make sure it gets written into the plan. That's a great challenge. The second challenge is a five minute observation. This is the exact thing a visiting educational psychologist would immediately clock when they walk into your room. Oh yeah, they spot it instantly. If they watched your highest need pupil for just one lesson today, what would they see? Would they see the adults utilizing least help first? or where they see a TA sitting permanently glued beside them the entire time, training them in dependency.

That is a tough mirror to look into. It is, but it is not a question you solve with a massive inset day training. It is a simple, five -minute observation, and it's an observation most schools have never actually done on their own classrooms. So the fix is completely free. Totally free. Pick one lesson this week. Pick one TA -supported pupil. Instead of sitting right beside them, use a prompt card. And when they struggle, count to five in your head before you jump in to help. Least help first.

Done on purpose. Just once. Just see what they do with those five seconds of wait time. See if they pick up the pencil themselves. Let's briefly recap the four main takeaways from today's evidence. First, the scale. $4 .4 billion a year, which is 13 % of the education budget. This means TA deployment is a major systemic leadership decision, not just a staffing footnote. Absolutely. Second, the DISS autopsy. 16 out of 21 results were negative. But remember, this was an autopsy of an arrangement, never a failure of the people working within it.

Right. Third, what actually works, structured interventions. When done right, they yield three to four months of extra progress, but only with proper training and a faithfully followed program. And finally, rule number two for the classroom. least help first. Because building a child's independent ownership of their learning beats simple task completion every single time. Everything we've discussed is linked in the show notes. You will find the full Education Endowment Foundation Report, all seven recommendations, and the specific study references, including the DIS project and the Tennessee STAR study.

Yep. We've also put together a printable one -pager summarizing all of this at theeducationcommute .co .uk. And while you were there, you can sign up for two free newsletters. One is designed specifically for school staff, and the other is for parents and carers. It's the exact same evidence, but written for the perspective of the person reading it. Safe trip in. See you at the gates.