Classroom assistants: Is this teaching on the cheap?

There are more classroom assistants in schools than ever before, and the biggest teaching union doesn't like it one bit. Hilary Wilce asks whether these helpers are bad for education or an invaluable asset

The recent agreement on cutting teachers' workload allows teaching assistants to supervise whole classes – to the fury of the largest teachers' union. The National Union of Teachers is convinced this will mean education on the cheap, as heads stretch their budgets by swopping untrained "teachers" for the real thing, and has pledged to fight against it.

But schools know this is a protest whose day has gone. Today's schools are awash with more than a dozen different kinds of non-teaching staff – classroom assistants, PE helpers, lab technicians, IT specialists – many of whom carry a high level of responsibility and are already taking classes. According to Unison, which represents 150,000 school support staff, a third of all teaching assistants regularly take over whole classes without a teacher being present, and more than 15 per cent are asked to cover for teacher absences. School inspectors have pointed out that these days teaching assistants might well be graduates or have other high-level skills, and many heads make no bones about the fact they would much prefer to use a tried and trusted teaching assistant to stand in for a teacher, than an untested supply teacher.

Even so, the NUT's worst scenario seems unlikely to come to pass. While the agreement acknowledges how much modern teaching has changed from a solo performance into a team activity, it is unlikely to prompt a permanent ditching of teachers' jobs in favour of cheaper assistants.

Because teaching assistants don't help teachers' workload, they add to it, says Rhona Seviour, head of Greneway Middle School, in Royston, Hertfordshire. Her school employs 14 of them and she is a big fan of the extra dimension they bring to education. But they take a lot of time to organise and manage, she says. "Teachers here say they value the help teaching assistants give them, but they have to liaise with them, meet with them, leave instructions for them, plan for them. It all adds to what they have to do. It doesn't reduce it."

What the new agreement will do, she says, is lead schools into ever-deeper waters when it comes to sorting out exactly what is teaching and what is not. Under it, trained "super assistants" can take charge of classes, provided they are supervised by a teacher. But this is bound to blur a fuzzy line further. Already many tricky issues come up, and these will grow as teaching assistants extend their powers. Will, for example, assistants be allowed to have a say in helping plan the work that they themselves will be expected to deliver to pupils?

"It's a complicated area, and schools are going to need to have good leadership, and strong relationships to be able to sort these things out. Anyone who thinks it is going to be easy will be mistaken," says Seviour. Heads know well that trying to wangle cut-price teachers out of the new deal would both offend teachers, and anger assistants, many of whom do not want to take on teachers' responsibilities – especially without being paid for them.

"I don't believe this agreement is a cheap option, and I would never use it like that," says Kenny Frederick, the head of George Green's School, in east London. "I have more than 70 support staff here, and many of them do very senior jobs, like coordinating our citizenship and careers provision, but they are not teachers, and I don't use them like that." The school is at the leading edge of career development for support staff, and the school offers training and development opportunities to teachers and assistants alike, with no tension between the groups. "Most of my teachers belong to the NUT, and they don't think teaching assistants stop them doing their job, they think they are helping them."

The school so values its teaching assistants that it scrapes money from all over to pay wages, which reflect what they do. But elsewhere assistants continue to earn a pittance. About 80 per cent earn below £8,000 a year, and differentials have grown. In 1995 teaching assistants earned 45 per cent of teachers' pay. By 2001 it was down to 38 per cent.

Yet these were the very years when assistants first began to show their worth in schools, says Roger Hancock, of the Open University, who has studied the role of teaching assistants, and believes the Government's literacy and numeracy strategies would never have worked without them. "They provided an enormous amount of remedial support. They mopped up the pedagogical casualties, and the behavioural ones, and left teachers with much smaller, better-behaved groups to cope with."

His work shows that teaching assistants are already expanding their roles in schools – so much so that they probably shouldn't be used to provide cover for teachers "because they are already doing more important things." About 10 per cent have higher-level training, and more than 90 per cent spend time alone teaching individuals or groups of children.

As in medicine and law, he says, the shape of the teaching profession is changing, with para-professionals moving into professional areas, and lines of demarcation dissolving. "Sometimes the only way you can tell who's who in a class is that the teacher is standing, and the teaching assistant is sitting down. And children don't know, either. "One said to us, 'Well the teacher tells us what to do, and she [the teaching assistant] makes it easier and simpler'."

Although teaching assistants can go on to train as teachers, Hancock found few actually willing to do of this. However, many are enthusiastic about taking short courses, and the take-up of places on the new two-year foundation degree programmes for teaching assistants has also been brisk.

But training opportunities will need to be expanded rapidly if enough higher-level assistants are to be created to meet the Government's plans – two new National Vocational Qualifications have been introduced to help with this. And as assistants increasingly become aware of their worth as skilled workers, their clamour for decent pay is set to grow. Unison has recruited 20,000 teaching assistants in the last 18 months – a significant number from a traditionally unassertive workforce – and is already pressing hard for employers to improve pay, conditions and career development, threatening that "tens and thousands" of equal pay claims could break over their heads if current talks fail.

"People are going to have to recognise that this is not something that comes without a cost, and that if the money's not there, our members are not going to be doing these extra duties," says Christina McAnea, education officer. What the new agreement has to signal, she says "is a shift in the culture as much as anything else, so that when heads think about spending money, they think about spending it on support staff alongside other things."

The money is there, says the Government, pointing out schools will get £3bn of extra funding between 2002 and 2006, but many wonder just how far this will stretch under these conditions.

However, David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says there is no chance of the consequence being a turf war between teachers and assistants. "I haven't come across anyone who expects to have difficulty with their staff over this, and no head would ever ram something like this through against their teachers' wishes."

"After all," says Kenny Frederick, "just because something is written on a piece of paper doesn't mean you have to do it. You find ways to be creative, and you take out of it whatever best suits you."

'She's an amazing teacher who can teach anything'

Sue Bolton joined Greenway First and Nursery School in Berkhamsted to supervise dinner times, sticking plasters on knees and comforting tots who were missing their mothers. Today, 11 years later, she is teaching a class of year-three children in the school's bright computer suite. As they struggle to create their first poster, she gently encourages them. "Remember what a computer is really, really, good at doing? That's right. Undoing." And like all good teachers she has eyes in the back of her head. "Now Daniel," she admonishes, "we don't need the headphones today. Put the headphones down."

As the school's ICT co-ordinator, she not only teaches children – and teachers – computer skills, but has also helped to plan and design the new computer room. She has done masses of one-to-one and small-group teaching, and runs a daily maths group, even though all her training has been on-the-job, and at 52 she feels too old to start training as a teacher.

Yet her head, Bobby Cadwallader, says she is an "amazing teacher" who can "teach absolutely anything" and that she will be using her to help implement the new workload agreement by having her take over responsibility for religious education, and taking the occasional afternoon class.

Is this the National Union of Teachers' worst nightmare? A teaching assistant who is pushing a teacher out of a job?

Not at all, says Cadwallader, who feels vehemently that support staff make an enormous contribution to schools. "There is no instance when I will ever use a teaching assistant to take a class on a regular basis. If people are not going to be paid for these extra duties, it is just exploitation to expect them to take them on."

Her solution has been to employ Bolton, and two others, as unqualified teachers, on the payscale that reflects this status. And, no, she says, she isn't doing teachers out of a job. Not only do people like Bolton have skills that the school badly needs, but it can also be impossible for schools to find suitable takers for the all-teaching jobs.

education@independent.co.uk