HLTA (qualified teacher) being used as cover

[LorlieS]

Posted in Education but no traffic...

AIBU to feel miffed about this?

I'm a qualified teacher with 20 years' experience but stepped down from class teaching about five years ago as workload was ridiculous and I wasn't having any time with my own children. I'm now working as an HLTA, specialising in supporting children with EHCPs. Love it. Hard work for appalling pay but it's my "thing." I take responsibility of interventions (both 1:1 and group) and ensuring work on EHCP targets is undertaken. Feels great to have autonomy whilst (hopefully) making a difference and I really get to know the children I work with.

However, it's a huge primary I work in and I find I am being pulled away from my job more and more to cover classes for staff absences. Very rarely with a TA and full class of 30. High SEN needs in all classes.

I used to get paid my teacher rate for such cover but now with budgets being what they are I dont; I am just paid my normal HLTA rate.

School loathe to get supply in as expensive.

I know that's the reality. In fact I'd bet my car that my daughters 14k of ehcp funding only has 1k spent on her a year. The senco even told me it goes towards the roof etc. Then they tell me they can't cope with her. I'm pretty close to telling them it's not in my power to fix. I had to appeal twice to get her ehcp up to standard, just to get funding they don't spend on her. You can see why or how this builds bad feelings towards the school. I'm tempted to say she doesn't need it as then they need to get proactive.

At some point the whole shit show will collapse. With the new white paper it will be very very soon. School are trying to expel my dd. If they do she will be disregistered asap to cut off the funding stream.

@P3bbl34875 I can't afford for my salary to drop any lower.

The senco even told me it goes towards the roof etc.

That’s bizarre-I’d ask for a breakdown of what they are spending it on as a provision map and submit that with the next AR.

It’s one thing to spend the money on a TA, but then that Ta to be off sick (eg one we currently employed as a 1:1 who said she was pregnant a week after starting and got signed off shortly after and hasn’t been back since October, but is still obviously being paid) but another to spend the money elsewhere.

@DyslexicPoster That is bloody awful that they actually say this to your face. I mean SEND parents know it happens but to not care and tell you to your face they are unlawfully using your child's funding for the roof!!

Yes it does and then some schools wonder why parents dislike them and do not want to work with them. They are actively admitting to putting your child at an even bigger disadvantage.

In my experience this is what schools want for parents/carers to not gain an EHCP or cease having one as it leaves the LA open to judical reviews if provision is not legally provided. If the child does not have a EHCP in place it is a lot easier to not provide provide child needs.

There wasn’t much in it in our school, certainly not enough to take on all the HLTA teaching that they do.

We have to record everything so we can prove that all EHCP support happens.

Academies do not have to employ qualified teachers to teach so this is very common now.

Due to our budget, we aren’t allowed any supply teacher cover so all our cover is done by TAs, some HLTAs and some by experienced L2 TAs. We are part of an academy.

TAs are paid an extra couple of pounds to deliver the lessons, manage behaviour and mark (in our own time) so not worth doing. If we don’t like it then we can leave ( which we are doing!) We are part of a union but that doesn’t really help as they are pretty useless when up against a large academy chain.

Holy cow 😳 So the teachers that take TA roles for a better home life, could find themselves (nearly) back at square one but with less pay, if the school becomes an academy??! Tesco is looking appealing!!

I worked as a technician in a school. I left when they were threatening to use us technicians as 'stand in' teachers to cover classes. We'd still have been paid tech wages (which were fairly pitiful) but would have all the stress of behaviour management and administering cover work, with no ability to choose which classes we covered.

I am actually a qualified teacher, I worked as a tech because the stress of teaching was not for me so I refused to be subjected to it for half the salary!

In my experience this is what schools want for parents/carers to not gain an EHCP or cease having one as it leaves the LA open to judical reviews if provision is not legally provided. If the child does not have a EHCP in place it is a lot easier to not provide provide child needs.

As a teacher I disagree. we want high need pupils to be issued with an EHCP as it means they get some funding to pay for more support.

You get to the point where you wonder you ever gave a shit about school coping with my daughter. Her provision map is along the lines off > group intervention for 8 with a hlta costing £14 pH for example. So that hlta is getting 8x£14 pH. Its just a lot if bs that if you question you get told your agressive and staff will leave because of you.

My daughters money pays for the generic playground supervisor for 360 kids as that's on the provision map. The generic lunch clubs open to any child that needs it. There's only the teacher and 30 kids I her class dispite her 14k funding. She has no access to a TA and gets hauled out the class by the head or the senco repeatedly and I only know this via other kids telling their parents who then moan at me. Do I pity the ht or senco having to deal directly with dd when they get funding for a TA? Like fuck do I. I hope dd grinds him down. That's their choice.

Parents that try to push back on the sen policy in mainstream are crushed.

If they say they need more funding at her next AR I fear I might laugh so hard I will wet myself. I'd also block it directly with the LA. I would do JR if I had the spirt left but I feel unsafe doing so.

@Redlocks28 This is not all schools obviously, but a good proportion do this and do not want to apply for a EHCP for a struggling child. You can see the appeal if a school does not apply for a child there is no legal re course for a parent/carer if their child does not get the help and support they need. I see this very often. It is nice to hear that your school is not one of them.

I think the irony of the OP is that the child/ren they support do have a plan and the school still manage to find a loophole to unlawfully use that funding to cover for a class teacher. Can you imagine what hope a child has without a EHCP.

@DyslexicPoster Of course it the classic parental blame usually in my experience that comes from the LA but have known a few school behave in this manner. Tbh funding is not your concern that is for the school to chase the LA if they feel a child's EHCP is not funded correctly and I would tell them this. A

All your concern should be is if provision is being provided, if not email your complaint to the director of children's services at your LA. Ipsea have module letters for this. Does she have funding for a TA in her plan?

It is soul destroying to so many parents, I see it day after day, the damage some schools and especially LA do to parents/carers. To see a thread today blatantly admitting to using a child's EHCP funding to cover a full class just makes my heart sink. When I know how it nearly breaks families just to get an EHCP you think that everything will be OK, then you realise that is just the start of the game trying to enforce it all your child's education is like being slowly crushed to death!

The only way to deal with this is to vote with your feet and leave.

If you don't, it sends the message that other perks of a job in education are worth putting up with this shit for, and they will keep doing it.

There are loads of vacancies in schools. Move.

The union should also have told you that covering for known absences should be done by supply teachers, not ‘in house’. That is quite a strict rule

It can’t be that strict a rule considering it happens all the time. Teachers have known absences for medical appointments for themselves or their children or they are granted a day off for their child’s graduation or other special occasions and it makes no sense to get a supply in for things like that even if the school could afford it.

What about PPA cover? We know PPA is supposed to happen every week and half the point of HLTAs is to cover that time. Ime, they either plan and mark those lessons themselves with minimal guidance from the teacher or they follow a scheme exactly the same way a teacher would.

I agree! That poster hasn’t come back to say where this very ‘strict rule’ can be found!

That's really bad. My school usually just employs level 3 TAs.

Was previously an HLTA.

In all honesty, I hate the terminology that HLTAs 'cover' lessons.

IME, lesson plans were either incredibly short, vague, poor or, in the majority of cases, non existent.

And when 'covering' a lesson, I didn't just read the children the learning objective, tell them a page number and then just sit back!
I answered a thousand questions, gave demonstrations, gave further explanations and followed child lead learning tangents. I also managed class behaviour and adapted work, where necessary, for children with SEND.

It was absolutely teaching (for which I worked hard to meet all of my HLTA standards) just in shorter snippets!

The minute the government decided it was perfectly acceptable for non-teachers to be in the front of a class of 30, this has been a disaster waiting to happen. Cut school budgets to the bone and heads will be forced to use anyone they possibly can on the lowest salary possible. It’s a shame as it wasn’t that many years ago that there was talk of teaching being a Masters-only profession.

I would give anything to go back to the role I was originally employed for.

Brief background...I spent a year of my career working in a Pupil Referral Unit for children permanently excluded from education and, although it was by far the most challenging part of my career to date, it was the place where I learnt the most professionally by far about working with SEMH children with extremely high levels of need (all EHCP). The physical violence was at first an eye-opener for sure! I learned about de-escalatiom techniques, qualified in physical restraint training and the (quite rightly) very strict rules surrounding this; it didn't feel like work but a vocation. My brother, who is autistic, suffered in the 80s at school because there just wasn't the awareness there is now and this has always been a major driving force for me too.

On the back of this, I was taken on at a mainstream school to work with an austisic child who was massively struggling within his class of 30. Three was concern he wouldn't be able to stay unless 1:1 help was put in place. Again, one of the best times in my career. A fantastic lad and I literally was able to 1:1 with him at all times. He went on to fluorish in a secondary specialist provision.

When he went moved up I continued my 1:1 role, supporting separately another three children with SEMH and EHCP. One of these children was split-site in that I accompanied her for one day at a specialist provision; a small unit again tailored to SEMH. Again, I learned so very much professionally.

Loved my job. My assistant head said he'd never come across anybody with the passion I have for working with SEMH children. I imagine that to be true; it is where I felt at home and God, I miss it.

Cut to budgets being as they are now.

I would say most of my job is now teaching cover (which I don't enjoy). The rest of the time I am used to undertake whole class spellings etc and then, after that, I support 4 EHCP children, all of whom are in the same class. This is often group teaching planned by solely by myself and delivered at a level they can access. When I can, I link this work closely with their IEP targets and continually assess their progress. It's not the same as working 1:1 by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn't say I know the children half as well as I would like. I constantly feel pulled in so many directions.

None of these children have a 1:1; a job that I would honestly give anything to do. In addition to these four EHCP children, there are many more across the year group with additional needs whom I simply can't be there for.

I try my best for these children but I know it's not enough.

The funding for schools or lack of in this country is an absolute disgrace.

The truth is that schools, Headteachers and Leaders are fighting a never ending battle trying to balance their books and some make very poor decisions because of their deficits - decisions that have a disastrous impact on some of the most vulnerable children.

It isn’t though a choice of book supply teachers to make sure that TAs get to stay with their assigned EHCP children because all that would happen then would be that they would spend too much money on supplies, be in deficit at the end of the year and have no choice but to cut staff and who would then be the first to go? Most likely those TAs…

I completely agree that teachers deserved a pay rise (and more than the 6.5% that they fought for) but this was just another thing to come out of the school’s budget. Along with the rising costs of heating and maintaining a building as big as a school.

My son is autistic and I’m in the process of fighting for him to get an EHCP but unless he got the highest level of funding, which he definitely won’t, the money given to the school would be nowhere near enough to cover the wages of a full time 1:1. What schools often end up with is a number of children with low funded EHCPs (maybe £6 - 9k) so an adult has to be shared between them.

(This isn’t in reference to your child’s allocated funding @DyslexicPoster - it sounds like the school your daughter’s at are failing miserably to meet her needs and I’m so sorry you’re going through that.)

And then the school gets worse and becomes undersubscribed meaning even less money…

Quite frankly it’s a shit show…

Sorry for the long rant ❤️ and @LorlieS if you go in to the headteacher and explain how unhappy your change in role is making you, they’d be stupid not to come to some kind of agreement. You could maybe offer to use your expertise in some other way like CPD sessions for other 1:1s and teaching staff. Explain that your passion is SEN and ensuring amazing outcomes for those children - not whole class teaching.

@Bex5490 I couldn't agree with you more. Working 1:1 with those children with EHCP was fantastic - the terrible pay bearable - because I was doing something I loved.
But roles like that are a thing of the past. There simply isn't the money.

Well I really hope your school are sensible enough to stop using you for cover when you have such valuable experience working with really challenging and high need children. I bet given your background and knowledge you could teach some of the teachers in your school some strategies 🤷🏽‍♀️

@Alicehatter

Yes, that can be the case.

For posters saying about schools and headteachers making decisions that are the best for the children - in academy schools financial decisions are made by the finance office who don’t know the children or staff, they are just reading a balance sheet from head office. It is the finance office who tell the headteachers that they are not allowed to use supply teachers. Headteachers no longer have the control over their own budgets, they don’t even set them. They are under so much pressure, trying to do their best for the children in their school whilst battling with the finance office. At the end of the day, if the finance office say no it means NO!

Unfortunately, I don’t think people realise how academy finance works. Don’t even get me started on how school A’s money can be used to support school B in the academy who have a deficit budget all because the academy has to balance the books.

Normal for a HLTA role