Optimising the impact of your support staff

The last few years have seen teaching and support assistant numbers plummet across all phases, the impact of which has been noteworthy for all the wrong reasons, as a rule. So, never has it been a better time to re-evaluate the way your remaining support staff are utilised both in and outside of the classroom. The poster by the EEF ‘Ten reasons to improve the use of Teaching Assistants’ is a great read if you need convincing that a review is required!

It is probable that the majority of those employed as learning support assistants (LSAs) in your school are done so on the back of additional funding linked to pupils with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and so it is, of course, essential that their time is spent ensuring that the needs of those individuals are met, in accordance with the content of their EHCPs. However, evidence from EEF research does suggest that more ‘general’ classroom- or subject-based support assistants:

• are best used to add value to the teacher – not to replace them.
• should have sufficient time for training and to meet teachers out of the classroom to enable necessary lesson preparation and feedback.
• should be trained to avoid prioritising task completion and instead concentrate on helping pupils develop ownership of tasks.
• should provide the least amount of help first, allowing sufficient wait time, so pupils can respond to a question or attempt the stage of a task independently.
• should only intervene when pupils demonstrate they are unable to proceed.
• are best used to deliver high quality intervention in 1:1 or small group settings. However, it should be noted that the impact is most positive when appropriate training has been undertaken and a structured intervention followed. (According to the research, support assistants deployed in more informal, unsupported instructional roles can impact negatively on pupils’ learning outcomes.)
• should also help by making connections between classroom learning and interventions more explicit as pupils are not always able to do so themselves.

The EEF summary article goes on to talk in a little more detail about evidence-based interventions and what session might look like – it is definitely worth looking at if you are considering a review of your LSA deployment and intervention timetable.