Should all teaching assistants be "phased out"?

[frickfo]

The government has cancelled the entire budget for training teaching assistants. And one of it's favourite think tanks, Reform, is proposing most TA jobs are axed to save £1.7b .
If you think teaching assistants are too valuable to lose from our schools please support this campaign.
weneedtas.blogspot.com/

So do ours, but mostly they rotate, since some of the one to one is so intensive and quite draining.

Have signed.

DS2 has a TA with him full time. H wouldn't be able to go to MS school if she was taken away

Done. The cuts are scaring the hell out of me .

singed.
no TAs at my sons future school would mean 1 adult walking 30 kids through the village to get to the village hall for PE. Or one adult managing 30 kids crossing the road that splits the school site to take Y1 to the field or Y2 to the library.

One Teacher with no TA in YR would mean they could all be either be inside or all outside, no free flow as at present.

It would also mean no afterschool dance clubs or choir or cookery club.

Done

signed

Signed. Without TA's schools are going to be worse off than they are now! I volunteer in classrooms often and certainly realise how important both TAs and volunteers are for the teacher to be able to actually teach the children! That's without even starting on the amount of SN kids who rely on TAs to help them recieve the best education possible for them!

DC will happily axe TA's (doesn't affect himand his pals) then will have the nerve to encourage all the TA's who then can't get another job around school hours to volunteer for the good of society -just wait.

Done.

Have also posted a comment, I may sound a little bolshie.

As we only have two specialist SEN support assistants one works mainly in KS1 and the other mainly in KS2 with children who have high dependency physical needs

Signed. I cannot believe the govt is so short sighted to even be considering getting rid of TAs. Their job is invaluable, and one I could not do.

I will be starting work as TA in September and spotted this news elsewhere. However, it's mis-reported here. They are not cutting all training for TA's at all. They are cutting the funding for training current TA's to HLTA status. I have mixed feelings on this as I know that HLTAs are used as cover supervisors instead of what they were originally planned to do and also that they are rarely paid at HLTA level as the schools can't afford it. Whilst I am sure that there are plenty of extremely good HLTAs who add a great deal to children's learning I'm not sure, as a parent, I would be happy with a non qualified teacher taking my child each week for PPA cover.

This all said, I've signed!

Signed.

inclusion is a cheap alternative to special schools so probably safe

I already signed (there was another post a while ago about this)

I think this is the one thing that would really push me to send my DC to an independent school. Which is what the Tories would love.

What Riven said!
My DS's school is unlikely to be able to fund TA training from their own budget as they saw the lay of the land and already carefully saved to be able to afford the kind of building work that has just been cut for others. It looks like schools are going to be shafted every which way no matter what they do :(

I suppose in SN school you may have a 1-2 ratio but you have very small classes where as in a MS school you have more children etc so 1-1 is required. I am a LSA BTW and have 2 1-1 in 2 different settings.

The cost to send a child to a special school is almost 3 times the amount a mainstream school is given to support a statemented child.
Smaller class sizes but lots of specialists employed on the staff and lots of specialist equipment and resources.

Specialists like OT and SaLT come out the health budget in maintained schools so no cost to the school

plus teachers in a spec needs school are on a higher scale than mainstream schools

done.

Don't know how any of the schools round here would cope without TAs!

Teaching assistants in special needs schools round here are are much lower rates than those working in mainstream so I suppose it's swings and roundabouts and post codes again.