TAs does your primary school have them?

This is the issue right here. The expectations on you are insane and the amount of unpaid hours you’re expected to work mounts up quickly.
The wellbeing push at schools at the moment is about ticking a box in my opinion. I’ve yet to hear a teacher or TA at my school or others feel their SLT genuinely care about their wellbeing. I’ve been in hospital with management asking if x,y and z have been completed. I’ve cried and lost hours of sleep over my workload. But it’s ok because I did attend a wellbeing day this year.

There are lots of individual factors which will impact on school funding - overall pupil numbers, proportion of pupil premium children, proportion of SEN children etc. Some schools also have more earned income from after school clubs, preschools, holiday clubs, premises rentals etc)

I can only speak for the local school for which I'm familiar with the budget. We have a £40k deficit in our budget arising directly from the unfunded pay increases in the academic year that has just ended, which has been paid for from our ever-dwindling reserves. We are a single academy trust and we don't have anyone on a 6-figure salary - nowhere near it tbh!

We absolutely do not want to lose a single member of support staff and we are scrabbling around looking for alternatives but everything else that can be cut has already been cut. So yes, this is a symptom of the wider issue of chronic underfunding but it is the unfunded pay increases that have tipped us over the edge at this particular time.

How do some primaries manage it? We just finished reception which had full time TA and the class teacher has been there 29 years so cannot be on the lowest rung… and lots of other very experienced staff.

I don’t understand why some school budgets manage it and some don’t. I do know that one local primary school built brand new is being absolutely slammed by maintenance costs due to the insane way they builders set up the air con/heating (it cannot be turned off so it’s been eating electricity).

Pay rises absolutely should be funded but, when you look at the numbers, the unfunded element of the teacher pay increase last year does not equate to the level of loss of support staff. It's being used as an excuse to draw attention away from general underfunding. The more it's repeated, the more effective that excuse becomes.

In my school, for example, the unfunded portion works out to be between 9k-12k. Yes, the leadership of a school could choose to balance that out with the loss of a single member of support staff but it absolutely does not account for the widescale loss seen in some schools. I'd argue that the six-figure salaries enjoyed by academy trust execs are more to blame than pay rises.

There's a wider confusion on this thread between TAs and INAs.

It isn’t necessarily confusion. Many 1:1s are actually called TAs by professionals, schools, TAs themselves and in EHCPs.

Yes, it happens a lot. As I said, LAs won’t fully fund EHCPs unless forced to. But they can be forced. Schools don’t have to fund the first £6k legally.

I agree that schools aren't funded properly and I have been saying this for years, have written to my MPs about it etc. But I also know that it is specifically the unfunded teacher pay increases that have pushed our local primary school into a deficit budget, and that this is what has prompted them to seek cuts elsewhere. Both of these statements can simultaneously be true.

It isn't about creating an us vs them narrative, or taking a shortsighted view. It is about recognising the fact that, when the government announces a pay increase for teachers, school budgets should be amended to reflect this - otherwise the government is seen by the public to be addressing the issues when it is actually just shifting the problem elsewhere and putting the responsibility on individual schools to fix the unfixable.

I am categorically not arguing in any way against the teacher pay increases. Of course teachers should be paid fairly, if not simply because it is morally the right thing to do then because we have a massive crisis of recruitment and retention within our schools. But governments shouldn't be allowed to take political credit for raising teacher pay if they are not increasing school budgets to match.

It depends on the child's needs, and what's set out in the EHCP. Some children (like mine) do need an adult stuck to them at all times, for their health and safety. And that's what in her EHCP.

There's a wider confusion on this thread between TAs and INAs. My daughter's INAs are not TAs. Her INAs have been trained to support my daughter and her needs, not the general needs of the class.

Not true at all. Children with EHCPs which states full time 1:1, will get funding to match. The issue is where the EHCP does not state 1:1, but the school decides it's needed.

More often, the (funded for 1 child) 1:1 is actually used for now general classroom support. This happened in my daughter's EYFS class (she has constant 1:1), until there were sufficient incidents for them to realise she needs that 1:1!

(School and 1:1s have been amazing since)

@JSMill yes that makes absolute sense! Everyone deserves pay reviews and everyone deserves to feel valued.

For me, it wasn't so much the actual pay but the fact that last year I was being paid exactly the same as a new starter who had absolutely no qualifications (other than GCSES) or experience. My previous 5 years of hard work in that school counted for nothing nor did any education related qualifications.

I’m in Ireland and TAs are not a thing here. We have SNAs who are usually assigned one-to-one with the child. They are also not included in the ratios for school trips, et cetera as they are literally just assigned to the one child on the trip. They are paid more than a TA in the UK also, they start on over 27,000

How much does everyone think a TA should be paid? I’m just curious as it keeps being mentioned

No, the issue is that schools aren't funded properly. If they were, any pay rise, for teachers, admin or support staff, wouldn't make a difference to the viability of maintaining an effective level of support staff.

Saying that it's specifically related to teacher pay is short-sighted at best and it creates a false 'them vs us' narrative rather than calling attention to the actual issue - overall funding of education.

We still have a TA allocated for every class, in addition to TAs as required for children with EHCPs. Our (LA) primary can do this because of funding from a local charitable trust, which means it hasn't suffered anything like as much as most from funding cuts.

The issue is that the teachers' pay rises weren't funded properly, pushing lots of schools into financial difficulties.

That doesn't mean that the teachers shouldn't get pay rises. It simply means that the last government's failure to fund those increases properly inevitably means that schools have to make cuts.

We have a TA for every class from R-Y2 and then a TA for every year group (2 classes) from y3-6

I left a TA job in a school I loved because I just got sick of the every increasing workload with no reward for performance or experience. We were also often asked to stay behind unpaid for meetings or do training in our own time. We were sent messages and emails in our personal time which we were expected to respond to, including a weekly email on a Sunday evening which we were expected to confirm we had read that evening! Meanwhile the staff room was decorated with posters telling us to look after our well being!!

I'm sorry but no. This isn't down to teacher pay rises. This is down to the 14 years of chronic and deliberate underfunding of education by the Conservatives. That's like blaming the final straw on the camel's back rather than all the other crap he's carrying. Funding in education is still, in real terms, lower than in 2010. Schools are operating on a mixture of goodwill and the emotional manipulation of their staff.

Properly thought-out and sustained funding for the type of educational model that we want for our children is the only solution to this issue.

They are all like that here, there’s about 12 small schools in our learning trust (although ours is the smallest) and they all have similar ratios. A few are single form entry but the majority aren’t.

It’s why property prices are so ridiculous- the schools are all very good.

I know they have been talking about raising teacher wages again but this is where they need to increase wages first.
TAs wages were kept low because parents (mostly mums) didn’t have many other options for work, now they do! Paying them minimum wage is a disgrace.
I worked in recruitment for a MAT and what they were asking from support staff was insane for the money, then they were shocked they would leave. Increasingly I saw schools employing unqualified/inexperienced school leavers as that’s all who would apply.

I think one of the biggest changes the government could make is increasing support staff in school. Staff numbers can make a big difference to things like behaviour and take work off teachers to let them teach.

I have volunteered in my kids classes for 15 years, have a Biology degree, have bern a governor in a SEN school for 7 years and I was told I don't have enough experience to be a TA. I worked a science technician in a school and was also a head science technician at a college where i also covered lessons.

I worked in cooperate IT for 17 years,as well so I'm not too dim.

Incredibly there's lots of interest me teaching. Go figure

That's really healthy for a small school. Small class sizes and TAs. Mixed age classes by no means assures a TA unfortunately. It's such a shame it differs so much between different schools.

Ours has them and as they have mixed age classes they need them.

3 teachers (3 classes) plus part time PE and RE teachers
4 TA’s

Small school though circa 70 kids 4-11 so our ratios are good.