Worlds apart? How pupils with special needs lead a life away from their teachers and classmates

Rob Webster and Peter Blatchford

This week the government’s long-awaited Children and Families Bill was presented to Parliament for its first reading. The Bill – which will prompt the biggest shake up of special educational needs (SEN) in 30 years – confirms one centrepiece proposal, heavily-trailed over the last 12 months: the replacement of statements of SEN with Education and Health Care Plans (EHCPs).

Statements are awarded to pupils with the highest level of SEN; they set out a pupil’s needs and the provision that he or she should receive to meet them.

These proposals follow ministers’ views that the current SEN system is unfit for purpose. But beyond parents’ genuine concerns about the statementing process, surprisingly little is known about the day-to-day teaching and support that pupils experience once a statement is put in place. Without such information, is the call for reform premature?

Findings from our Making a Statement (MaSt) project fill this gap and raise important points for policymakers to consider. Over 2011/12, we carried out minute-by-minute observations on 48 pupils in Year 5 who had statements for moderate learning difficulties or behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, and interviewed 200 school staff and parents.

The results show that the educational experiences of pupils with statements is characterised by a high degree of separation. Compared to average-attaining pupils, they spent over a quarter of their week away from their class, teacher and peers.

A clear point to emerge from the MaSt study was the almost constant accompanying presence of a teaching assistant (TA) in the locations – both in and away from the classroom –where pupils worked. Compared to average attaining pupils, we found that pupils with statements spent less time in whole class teaching with teachers, and were more than three times more likely to interact with TAs than teachers.

In many cases TAs also put together alternative curricula and prepared intervention programmes. They also had the main responsibility for verbally differentiating teachers’ tasks, often in the moment, having had little or no opportunity before lessons to meet or prepare with the teacher.

Teachers, on the other hand, rarely had as high a level of involvement in planning and teaching statemented pupils as TAs, or provided the extra level of differentiation these pupils needed. This is very likely to be connected to the gap in knowledge teachers especially had in knowing how to meet the needs of the particular statemented pupil in their class.

As a result of current arrangements, we found that whilst the support provided (largely by TAs) was clearly well intentioned, it seemed insufficient to close the attainment gap.

Not only did pupils with statements spent less time in whole class teaching with the teacher, but they also had almost half as many interactions with their classmates compared to other pupils. This, we argue, is likely to adversely affect their social development.

Spending a week at a time observing at close quarters, and discussion with practitioners and parents/carers, brought home how schools are making every effort to attend to the needs of pupils with statements amid a period of intense flux and uncertainty in schools and local authorities. However, findings from the MaSt project and our previous research – the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project – raise questions about the appropriateness of current arrangements.

Statements entitle pupils to a set number of hours of TA support. Yet, the DISS project found that compared to their peers, pupils who had the most support from TAs did less well academically, and this finding was especially clear for pupils with SEN.

With EHCPs replacing statements, a key message from our research is that the currency of statements should change from “hours” to “pedagogy”. We suggest EHCPs specify the pedagogical processes and strategies that will help meet carefully defined outcomes.

Crucially though, while we recommend the new SEN reforms do away with “hours”, we do not suggest they do away with TAs. Which is why, as well as thinking more inclusively about pupils with statements, schools and teachers also need to rethink the role of TAs. Our new book, Maximising the Impact of TAs provides guidance on this.

The Making a Statement project was an independent research project, funded by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation.

To download the MaSt project Final Report, and for more on our research, visit www.schoolsupportstaff.net

The guide on the side: realising the value of teaching assistants

Rob Webster, Peter Blatchford and Anthony Russell

What does it mean to be educated? What does an educated person look like? These worthy questions were the subjects of debate at the recent IOE-hosted, London Festival of Education, and, unsurprisingly, teachers were central to responses.

The role of the teacher in shaping young minds, developing rounded individuals, and inspiring the great and the good is long established – and no doubt responsible for motivating subsequent generations to rise to the challenge of a career in teaching.

What is less often discussed, however, is what role the second largest group of school staff – teaching assistants (TAs) – can do to support the learning and development of children and young people.

TAs are an integral part of classroom life, comprising 25% of the school workforce. Yet our earlier Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project has shown that school leaders and teachers do not make the most of this valued resource. In fact, the more support pupils received from TAs, the less academic progress they make.

Importantly though, it is not decisions made by the TAs, but decisions made by school leaders and teachers about how TAs are used and prepared which best explain these provocative results.

Michael Barber’s popular aphorism, “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”, is a helpful reminder that it’s people that make the difference in education, but their effectiveness can be constrained by factors beyond their control. We might, then, say that the effectiveness of TAs cannot exceed the quality of their deployment and preparation.

Schools, we argue, must fundamentally rethink how they deploy and prepare TAs if they are to get the best use from them in helping pupils. But there’s a third factor.

We’ve known for years that the quality of verbal interactions between teachers and pupils is at the heart of effective teaching and learning. But little attention has been given to interactions between TAs and pupils.

Our research shows that pupils are far more likely to have active and sustained interactions with a TA than they are with a teacher, but when they do, TAs’ talk focuses far more on task completion than learning and understanding.

Given the opportunity that TAs have for quality interactions with pupils, schools should think carefully about how TAs’ talk can contribute to the broad aims of producing confident young people, able to thrive in an uncertain future.

Defining a new role for TAs – one that can add value to what teachers do – was the basis for our collaborative Effective Deployment of TAs project. We found that a particularly productive starting point for rethinking the TA role was in terms of developing pupils’ independent thinking skills; to inculcate a particular habit of mind that helps pupils to figure out what to do when they don’t know what to do.

Our research shows that problems occur when TAs find themselves in a pedagogical role for which they have not been adequately prepared. Crucially, a role as the ‘guide on the side’ is less about teaching and more about helping pupils to internalise and practise valuable skills of self-sufficiency. What’s more, these skills are transferable; TAs can reinforce them across the curriculum.

The results of our study showed that schools achieved marked and productive changes to the ways TAs were deployed and prepared, and how they interacted with pupils.

We have captured how schools achieved this in our new book, Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants, which presents well-informed guidance and classroom-tested strategies on how to unleash the huge potential of TAs.

If school leaders explicitly set out a vision for role and purpose of TAs, and properly prepare and support them, we believe they can make a significant contribution to the way pupils learn and achieve. Perhaps, in years to come, pupils will not only talk fondly of how teachers inspired them and gave them self-belief, but of how teaching assistants did too.

Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants: Guidance for school leaders and teachers, by Anthony Russell, Rob Webster and Peter Blatchford, is published on 23^rd November 2012 by Routledge.

To find out about a short course on this theme at the IOE click here

For more, visit www.schoolsupportstaff.net

The pupil premium: should schools invest in teaching assistants?

Peter Blatchford and Rob Webster

The government has announced plans that could change the way schools manage provision for some of the most vulnerable pupils. Both the injection of cash for pupils on free school meals via the Pupil Premium and the plan to give parents of pupils with a statement of special educational needs (SEN) control over their child’s SEN budget are part of the coalition’s drive to give schools and parents the power and resources to fund the expert support they need to progress.

Of course, the groups of pupils at whom these two funding sources are targeted are not the same, though they do overlap: the government’s own data show that pupils with a statement for SEN are twice as likely to be eligible for free school meals as their peers.

Much has been made of the devolution of power from the centre in the drive to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, for example, made a virtue of the freedom headteachers have to spend the £488 per child Pupil Premium. He wants to see schools innovate, then publicise the most effective strategies.

Over the last 15 years, teaching assistants (TAs) have become a central part of policy and practice in meeting the needs of lower-attaining pupils and those with SEN. Over this period, TAs have grown to comprise a quarter of the UK mainstream school workforce. The general sense is that using TAs to provide one-to-one and small group support to struggling pupils works well, and it is likely that schools will seek to extend this through the Pupil Premium. However, our research offers a word of caution.

Results first published in 2009 and described in our new book, Reassessing the Impact of Teaching Assistants: How Research Challenges Practice and Policy, raise concerns about the impact of TA support on pupils’ academic progress.

Our five-year study, the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project (the largest study of TAs worldwide) measured the effect of the amount of TA support on the academic progress of 8,200 pupils, while controlling for factors like prior attainment and level of SEN. Worryingly, our analyses across seven year groups found that those who received the most support from TAs consistently made less progress than similar pupils who received less TA support.

So, are we suggesting that schools and parents look elsewhere to invest their funds? Far from it. Blaming TAs would, in our view, be wrong. As other results from the DISS project show, it is the decisions made about – not by – TAs, in terms of their deployment and preparation, which are at fault.

We found that there has been a drift towards TAs becoming, in effect, the primary educators of lower-attaining pupils and those with SEN. Teachers like this arrangement because they can then teach the rest of the class, in the knowledge that the children in most need get more individual attention. But the more support pupils get from TAs, the less they get from teachers. What is more, our detailed analysis of classroom talk showed that compared to teachers, TAs’ talk to pupils tends to focus on task completion rather than developing understanding – most likely as a result of having limited opportunities to meet with teachers before lessons.

The government has not ringfenced Pupil Premium cash, but it will – via Ofsted and league tables – hold schools accountable for how it is spent. Our view – outlined in Reassessing the Impact of TAs – is that schools must undertake a fundamental rethink of the purpose and role of TAs if they are to get the best use from TAs and help disadvantaged pupils.

To this end we have been conducting a follow up study, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, in which we have been collaborating with schools to develop and evaluate strategies for improving the use of TAs. The results of this research, which to date are extremely positive, will feature in a future blog.