Helping pupils with reading. Teaching Assistant

[wavingfuriously]

older person here, no formal teaching qualifications but would like to explore perhaps starter role as teaching assistant... aware that best to gain experience doing voluntary work with children. Don't know where to start really, posting for any kind tips or advice please 🙏 thank you

Schools will always want a DBS certificate, so it would help if you apply for your own basic one. Enhanced ones, I think, can only be applied for through an employer - and any school you work at may well do this. And have a couple of people on standby to use as professional referees (from employment or volunteering or a church you’re involved with for example.) Other than that the best thing would be to email the head at the schools you’d like to volunteer at. Teaching assistant vacancies come up regularly so if you’re already volunteering you’d be in a good position to apply. Good luck!

Ask a few local primary schools if they need volunteers to listen to reading. Most would bite your hand off.

Going in as a volunteer to listen to readers is a good starting point but, in reality, it's nothing close to the role of a teaching assistant or learning support assistant. Yes, there will be some listening reading involved but alongside a host of other duties that are (sadly) not reflected by the low pay linked to the role.

I suggest looking at a selection of TA/LSA job descriptions for current vacancies to get an overview of the skills and duties employers expect. You will then be able to see which skills you already have and which you will need to develop. You'll then be able to tailor your volunteering to help you build these.

You can obtain formal qualifications for the role, it's around £500-£600 to do a remote course at your own pace via somewhere like LearnDirect. If you speak to local schools, there will more then likely be one who will take you on for 1-2 days a week as an unpaid placement student and assign you a supervisor so you can get your practical competencies signed off in order to qualify.

I would volunteer in schools (preferably more than one) for a while. This will not only give you material for any job application, but also a real insight into what teaching assistants currently do.

Over the last 5+ years, school funding has become so squeezed that the ‘classic’ class TA role - hear readers, help groups of children in the classroom etc - has largely disappeared. Most roles are now to support very high needs children 1:1 - and these needs may well include very dysregulated behaviour, significant physical needs, toileting, and working many years below age expected norms (Reception/ Y1 curriculum in a Y5 classroom l, for example. Even when a role is advertised as a ‘class’ TA, it may well be that the vast majority of your time us with a few very high needs children, often outside the classroom.

If you watch TAs in your volunteer schools and go ‘yes, this is absolutely the role for me’, then that is the point to apply.

When you volunteer make sure you have a date when you will stop volunteering e.g. one or two terms, otherwise you will end up as an unpaid teaching assistant forever.

Also there is lots of pettiness in primary schools that's really hard to put up with as a mature person. Expect 25 year olds to insist on you sitting in a different chair or something equally inane to prove they're in charge. Just smile and focus on the actual children.

Really knowledgeable replies. thank you everyone!👍 👍