To only have a qualified teacher 3 days a week?

Not acceptable. As a reason why. Post apartheid South Africa promoted all of the mainly black teaching assistants to be full teachers, without providing any training or education for them...not their fault but the last time I visited in 2011, 800 schools had no kids that graduated at 18....I spoke to a qualified teacher about it and it was clearly in the schools where there very few or no qualified teachers

Yanbu at all. Years ago PPA/ training/ management responsibilities would have been covered by a qualified teacher. In some schools this was a semi retired teacher or a part time teacher who would only work 2.5 days a week or mornings or afternoons only.

Unfortunately our schools are so underfunded they have started using TAs and HLTAs to fill those gaps. Academies and private schools have always been able to do as they like in regard to qualified teaching and support staff.

In many cases a lot of HLTAs are actually qualified teachers who have taken HLTA jobs for the lighter workload - no or very reduced planning/ prep/ marking/ parent consultation/ EHCP meetings ect. It is entirely unfair however to expect them to be teaching full classes in place of a teacher and should be paid accordingly for that.

We have similar happening this year, my DD has one of the deputy heads who is acting up as head this year until March when the headteacher returns from Maternity leave. From what has happened this year since the deputy head stood up as acting head and the meet the teacher yesterday it seems she will have her teacher 3 days and then 2 days she will have a HLTA and TA. The class TA they have this year is going up with them and is herself a HLTA so one day they will have 2 HLTAs and then the other day they will have the class TA. From what I gather from other parents whose children currently have the deputy head on on of her release days it's P.E (taken by a coach), French (the subject specialism of the HLTA), Art/ DT and R.E. Maths is a recap/ consolidation day and phonics goes on as normal as they are in small groups across ks1 and go to their usual group leader and whoever is covering deputy head takes their group. I'm going to see what it looks like in September and as we hope it is only a temporary arrangement willing to long it out. If however DD suffers I will raise it.

We've lost 5 TAs this year at our school. Only DDs class and the other deputy head's class (who is acting head teacher the other days when DDs teacher is in class) have a general class TA. The other classes only have a LSA if a student in their class has a 1:1. We are losing a member of office staff who isn't been replaced. 1 HLTA is floating across all classes doing interventions all day. The other HLTA is PPA cover.

My friend works at a different school and it is the same there. Only TAs in classes acting as LSAs for students with EHCPs and then strictly the hours on their EHCP. They have all had to drop down to 3 or 4 days in order to retain all their jobs. 1 HLTA covering all PPA/ management time. Only 1 class will have a general class TA and that class has a lot of learning and behaviour support and health needs.

It is possible at least one of the TAs is a qualified teacher, quite a few teachers have switched jobs to become TAs in an attempt to reduce workload, stress but still remain in education. However, this will have backfired if they are now being expected to teach

This is not ideal. Schools won’t usually be making this choice lightly. Not fair on anyone though

Is it an academy? I have a feeling they are allowed to have unqualified teachers.

I would still consider entering a formal complaint. Is Ofsted likely to come into the school? I suspect they may not be impressed.

That’s dreadful and sadly I’m unsurprised. It’s gone beyond what the original point of the cover supervisor’s job was. We had a supply teacher for almost half of year 10 for one of my options subjects. He had no knowledge of the subject and seemed to have a habit of pointing that out every lesson 😆. Nonetheless he was a qualified teacher at least, and we were given work to get on with.

For 1 school year I worked as a cover supervisor at a secondary school 17 years ago and yes, there were certain teachers, whose classes I seemed to cover more regularly than others. Covering a class for an entire academic year though?

I'm a primary school teacher and yanbu. The school will be doing it to save money and are very likely to be paying the TAs on an HLTA rate rather than an unqualified teacher rate. I was in a similar position once where I worked 0.8 but the school covered the rest with a TA but didn't expect them to do any planning or marking and I still had to do all reports etc. There are plenty of teachers who want to work part time so it would have been easy to recruit a job share in your DS's situation.

Are they qualified teachers who work as TAs? In our school we have some teachers who work/paid as TAs for 1 day a week and then paid to work as a teacher 1 day a week.

I think this also comes down to how much classroom experience the TA/HLTA has. I would take a TA with 20 years experience over an NQT any day. This isn't a first choice for schools nor is it the first choice for the TAs either. They are paid a pittance for what they do and even in teaching capacity their increase is minimal.

My concern would be the core subjects which always take place on a morning, so maths and English. I would be asking the school about that. What should be happening is the teacher provides the lesson plan and also a teacher should mark the English work. It is easy to mark primary level maths work it is more difficult to assess levels in written work.

There must be loads of teachers who want 2 days a week because those jobs are rare and numbers of teachers with kids of their own are high

makes no sense. Write to the head asking why

Only going to get more common with yet another not fully funded teacher pay rise, and teacher recruitment/retention crisis (so schools can’t afford to hire new teachers even if there were any to hire!)

When I was working as a TA I ended up in charge of a class for the best part of a year, with another TA rotating in to help, while the class teacher was off for cancer treatment.

If the teacher is part-time they won’t be lesson planning for the days they aren’t there.

YANBU but this is going to become a regular sight across schools in the coming years because of the recruitment and retainment crisis. The vast majority of newly qualified teachers are giving up after a year or so and the more experienced ones are leaving the profession in droves.

The hats exactly what’s happened which is why lots of staff have lost their jobs.

Wait till you get to secondary, my middle DS didn't have a physics teacher for the whole of Year 10, had various cover supervisors while they watched physics videos on YouTube!

This is an important question.

Unless the school is local authority maintained (if you’re in England) then schools aren’t required to have qualified teachers. Many academies and private schools hire unqualified teachers and often parents wouldn’t know it because that’s all they did. I’ve seen in a lot of secondaries where TAs were later giving classes to teach because it was their subject specialism.

As a parent you have every right to raise concerns about your child’s education. I think given this was the case last year and is again next year I would ask if the school had plans to recruit a teacher for the remaining two days (my son’s school has a few job shares with 3+2 or even 3+3). But keep in mind if it’s an academy there might not be a lot you can do to push back.

Blame the government. They’ve agreed a pay rise and then told schools they have to fund it out their existing budgets. At a time when costs such as energy bills are also rising and their budgets aren’t increasing at the same rate. Guess schools have to cut teaching hours to save money 🤷‍♀️

I’d want to find out more about the rationale and practical plans, could you arrange a meeting or phone call with the Headteacher to discuss? They may have some solid plans for specialist teachers to come in and teach with TA support for consistency on those days (we have Music, Spanish and DT delivered this way, and in the past also PE and Computing). However, ultimately, school funding and therefore staffing is so so tight - it might be your MP that you need to raise this with (once you have a bit more info).

Even if they had a full time teacher, half a day per week would be PPA cover, which is often provided by a HLTA. So that leaves 1.5 days.

I’d be questioning what the plan was for English and Maths on those two days. If a teacher is planning work and the HLTAs are just delivering it, I wouldn’t be concerned. Weekly plans can be done so that 1-2 lessons a week are consolidating skills rather than teaching new concepts.

If the majority of those two days are things like PSHE, MFL, Computing and PE, I wouldn’t be concerned. HLTAs can do training to be specialised in those things, or there could be dedicated PE and MFL teachers who hop around classes.

I imagine it’s a cost saving exercise. The school I currently work at (not for much longer) is doing similar from September. TAs will be utilised in a teaching capacity more often and interventions will be across the whole day. I can see AI being slotted into this in the future too as my class teacher said sometimes the only thing that will guarantee the whole class focuses, is when looking at a screen.

We've had similar to this. Last year DS had a HLTA lead the class 1.5 days a week i.e. the teacher worked 4 days and had half a day PPE. This year, similar seems to be happening due to his teacher having other responsibilities/courses meaning she is out the classroom a lot. It's unclear to parents, but has likely been 2 days a week added up.

It's definitely not ideal. It's more planning for the teacher and more responsibility (without the same pay) for the TA. However it hasn't caused us an issue. DS seems to know the timetable and is happy with the group of adults leading his class. For my DC there are some pros of working with different adults. When the teacher is off for another reason, they can usually cover with someone from their familiar 'team'.

I don't think you can complain, or at least it won't get you anywhere, but you can ask about consistency e.g. with behaviour management, to make sure your DS is well supported.