Teaching assistants - should they be "phased out"?

[frickfo]

The government has axed the whole central budget for training teaching assistants, and one of its favoured think tanks, Reform, is proposing that ALL teaching assistant jobs are "phased out" to save money.

If you think this is a bad idea, please join our campaign weneedtas.blogspot.com/

Can't we have good quality teachers AND small class sizes AND fab TAs..?

I've signed and will be spreading the word about this.

It'll be the most vulnerable children, those who struggle the most, those who have special needs, those who have least support at home who will lose from this.

The Tories don't care though, do they?

If a child has special needs their support will still be in place as it is funded differently.

In our school TAs were taken out of the classrooms (all but reception) and reallocated based on pupil need.

The TAs now provide support to the children who need it and I think it is fantastic, they can provide much needed 1-1 support in small groups and have children reading and writing before they leave KS1 where as before there were many children that went into KS2 not being able to do either.

This is a win/win situation as the TAs are used to the best of their ability and the children are getting targetted support.

TA's can be really good if they are trained and used appropriately. From my experience they seem to be used to keep an eye on the so called 'problem' kids. This is not good for the child or TA.

I really do wonder what is happening in education? At the end of the day I suppose we can assume that where ever they can the government will look to make savings, whatever the 'cost' to our children.

Claig "we never had TAs either, but we never used to have differentiation as a teaching method, we used whole class teaching."

Teachers usually start the lesson with whole class teaching - good teachers make this interactive and find ways to extend more able children while doing this though, so there is still differentiation. What about guided group work, though - does the teacher never work with a small group? They must do.

We didn'thav TAs either, but I did think education had moved on and improved over the years, ad part of this is having smaller adult:child ratios, with TAs p;laying a big part in this.

We also, I believe, have more children in schools with additional needs such as EAL and SEN, due to changing factors within the education system as a whole or our changing population.

We are also more aware of differing children's needs and try to incorporate these mpre within the classroom, and a good TA can enable this to happen, even when there is no statement in place setting our specific one to one requirements.

So how does Gove propose dealing with children with SN?

a) abandon all hope of inclusion and pack them off to special school
b) ignore them
c) allow a situation to happen where children of SEN are concentrated in the 'worst' (ie lowest performing in results terms) schools

children WITH SEN I meant!

I said this would happen if the tories got in.

'So how does Gove propose dealing with children with SN?' Turn schools into academies and allow the governors the power to exclude them willy nilly.

Although many are broke after having to put the brakes on their careers to meet their child's needs while the LEA pisses about.

I asked Gove about inclusion on his webchat here and he was adamant that inclusion would be supported under the tories, as well as special school education - parents' choice bla bla bla

I asked because the suspicion was that they would abandon inclusion in mainstream.........funny that!

I think his pants are on fire, and his hair is sticking up like telephone wire.

I want to cry.

Of course I could cope and teach my class without the help of my TA, but the teaching would be far less effective.

When work is differentiated, my TA will work with a group to support them. That could be with the Gifted group so that they are being stretched and pushed, or with the SEN group who need lots of extra support and input.

If I was alone, I could only focus my attention on the SEN children in every lesson or risk them sinking without a trace with no support, which would leave some children languishing with no idea (they are year 1, so not very independent anyway).

So - during the morning, my TA works with groups in the classroom. During teaching time, she sits with a group of children who have less English to help them to understand what I am saying. Every afternoon, all of the school's TAs are allocated a group of children who need extra support. My Teaching Assistant takes several year 1 children one at a time for extra literacy intervention. Then she spends an hour in reception doing speaking and listening activities with children who have very little English.

All of this support is highly targeted and necessary for these children to make progress. I am tired of people saying 'well, we didn't have them in our day'. The push for inclusion means that we have far more children in mainstream school who need extra help. Also, when I was at school, struggling children just struggled and had support when the teacher had time. That is no good thing.

That is quite apart from the fact that my TA does all sorts of jobs in the classroom to free me up to do what I was trained to do.

Class sizes increasing? Aaaargh. Don't start me off. Either we are expected to deliver personalised learning, as Ofsted expects, or we are not. Larger class sizes makes that personalisation near impossible.

I could scream. This Government is making me want to leave the country.

I would like to add that none of the children who have SEN in my class are statemented, so they would not be eligible for special education either, if that is what the Tories are up to. They would simply struggle in mainstream schooling getting further and further behind.

But SN schools couldn't cope without TAs and if they don't train them ( mainly through MS schools ) they won't be there either.

Dd2 has speech problems and is on SA but no where near statementing and has made so much progress this year with daily input from the class TA. Most schools don't even have a class TA in juniors.

We only have ONE TA between 6 classes

You won't have that if Gove gets his way. You'll have no TA and less than 6 classes.

lifeissweet you just posted exactly what I was going to say. My TAs have always been invaluable. It is hard enough to get everything done and the teaching done with a TA in the classroom never mind without.

"Although many are broke after having to put the brakes on their careers to meet their child's needs while the LEA pisses about."

No worries there, silky. Many of them will have plenty of time on their hands, having been made redundant

It just gets worse and worse. I imagine even Tory voters will start to feel uncomfortable. The excuse that the government are forced to do things like this to fix New Liebour's (sic) mess will surely start to wear thin once their DCs are sitting in crumbling classrooms that were meant to be rebuilt, alongside 40 other pupils, with no TA, having eaten a crappy lunch of transfats. But then I suppose if they're out of work, home ed becomes more of an option...

Can anyone explain why at Primary School there were 30 kids in my class and no TA in the 1970s but now we have TAs?

What changed so that we suddenly needed TAs?

Er... progression?