Teaching Assistants...
From politicians and parents to teachers on Twitter everyone has an opinion on the umbrella job role known as 'the' Teaching Assistant (or TAs as we are known in the biz). However, I don't think many people truly realise that the Teaching Assistant role is just as demanding and has become just as varied as the variety of teaching positions out there. Nor do they realise how hurtful a off-handed comments such as 'Oh I'm sure you don't have to worry because you are just a TA' or 'It's not like you are a real teacher, is it - just a TA' can be. While it is factually accurate I am not a teacher, I do not have all the responsibilities of a teacher; I work damn hard at my job for very little recognition in my profession.
Just reflect for a moment on the perception of the role...
When someone enquires about your profession, the response "teacher " is almost always met with the automatic follow-up question- 'What kind?' and this simple question covers a spectrum of possibilities:
- Sector: Primary? Secondary? Post-16?;
- Specialisation: English? Maths? Special Ed?;
- Progression: Curriculum Leader? Advanced Skills? Deputy Head?
However, say you are a Teaching Assistant and the common man will not enquire whether you are class-based or target focused... He will not query whether you are qualified to a 'higher level status' or if you have undergone additional training to become a specialised in an area of the curriculum or aspect of Special Educational Needs. The astute parent or professional may ask your sector, perhaps even your enquire about a possible specialisation, but more often than not this response generates 'the question':
"Oh! (Look of surprise/horror) Did you not want to be to a teacher then?"
Here's where it get tricky... because I do want to be a teacher somewhere down the line once my own little darlings are safely in the warm embrace of the education system and motherhood becomes a little easier to juggle. However, not every Teaching Assistant aspires to be a Teacher, in the same way that not every classroom Teacher aspires to climb the ladder to Headship. I became a Teaching Assistant to gain experience in the classroom until my circumstances would be better suited to the demands of Initial Teacher Training and a career in teaching. So when I get 'the question' I get off a little easier than some of my teaching assistant colleagues. But others who chose a different career direction in our sector are forced to bat off suggestions that they lack the professional ability or intellectual capacity to be a teacher.
Though as my sage colleague notes in response to 'the question', (and a popular opinion, amongst a increasing number of Teaching Assistants) why would most most Teaching Assistants WANT to be teachers when year after year we watch good and outstanding teachers sacrifice their home lives working late to complete stacks of necessary paperwork and meet data deadlines? Why would we WANT to give up weekends to plan lessons that are judged by contradicting standards? Inspiring but purposeful; challenging but differentiated. Why would we WANT to put myself through the horrors of being judged by Ofsted inspected, verbally abused by parents, tormented by 'progress made' which doesn't accurately reflect the progress of the 'whole child'? Especially when we have seen too many times the eventual succumbing to the consuming beast of our educational system that works teachers until they leave the profession defeated for a less demanding job with better pay and conditions and a healthier home/work balance.
However, many of us, myself included, already do a lot of these things. At least four days a week, I stay late to support my class teacher (a charming older gent with too much to remember and an allergy to organisation) with administration or setting up tomorrows learning. A number of teaching assistants put aside a little of our weekend to plan our interventions so that our sessions are of the same high quality we expect from our professional partners. We face the same impossible expectations from Ofsted, the same problem parents and suffer the same heartache as our teaching compadres when after months of focused intervention little Timmy still hasn't moved up a sub-level in Maths. So, beyond the my friend's cynicism, (or a arguably realistic perspective of teaching); beyond the obsession with the rigid roles of 'Teacher' and ' Teaching Assistant' rather than focus on collaborative practice, I suppose the the real question that is ticking away in my mind is: exactly what's wrong with being 'just' a TA?
...And I suppose in part I can answer that!
The Teaching Assistant role is frequently trivialised, both intentionally and accidentally, by other professionals; undervalued by parents and our teaching colleagues alike and, despite what Mr Gove wants you to think, massively underpaid. There is an assumption that the Teaching Assistant role is homogenised and unskilled - that Teaching Assistants are glorified classroom helpers who, according to Mr Gove and the sensationalist media outlets, hinder children's educations by acting a middleman between child and the only qualified professional in the room- the teacher. That just isn't true. In my current school, of the five teaching assistants in KS2, myself and two others have degrees in education, another is a specialist in Specific Learning Difficulties with 15 years experience and last has a better subject knowledge than the NQT Year 6 teacher after working in a secondary school for 7 years. Each of us has worked in education longer than 90% of the teachers at the school and collectively (just based on copies of course notes in our intervention room from the last three years) have attended 30+ courses on everything from Numicon to speech and language.
Yet regardless of this, the view of teaching assistants being ineffective busy-bodies with lacking subject knowledge and skills isn't just the view of misguided outsiders with no experience in a classroom, this view is shared by so many teachers, headteachers and governors and perpetuated by parents frustrated by the lack of transparency in our education system. Just yesterday I read a blog post of a twitter teacher that I professionally admire that admitted in relation to her own child's education initially she blamed the TA for the troubled relationship between her child and his class teacher- of course there are individual circumstances all over this example but my point is this...
I am not a martyr for my cause; I know that for every hard-working Teaching Assistant that are another three who seemingly live on another planet and feed these negative perceptions of the role but we don't condemn teachers by the few inadequate ones who thought teaching would be short hours and long holidays. Instead, our Unions fight for media attention, our academic figure-heads debate with politicians and as a profession we put aside our petty rivalries between primary and secondary, mainstream and special and stand in solidarity for educational values. So why then as a profession do we not recognise the contribution of our hard-working teaching assistants both in our professional lives and in the eyes of the general public instead condemning them to a career as just a TA?