Issue 19: Working with Teaching Assistants to support children with Special educational needs | Sara Alston

In many schools, when a child has SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) and needs support to access learning or make progress, the default response is support from an additional adult. This additional adult is almost always a TA (teaching assistant)- a paraprofessional. While many TAs are excellent and experienced practitioners, they are rarely qualified teachers.

There is a real danger in this approach leading to the education of our most vulnerable children being, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘outsourced’ to a less qualified adult. It is often a TA who implements interventions, provides differentiation, and adapts learning tasks, supporting the child to access learning within the classroom.

Unfortunately, few TAs receive any training beyond experience ‘on the job’. They are often poorly paid, leading to recruitment and retention problems. Further, their hours are often little more than the time when the children they are supporting are in school, so they have limited time to liaise with their teaching colleagues. Few of us do our best work when we do not fully understand what we are doing, yet this is the situation many TAs find themselves in on a daily basis.

Further, there is little training and few resources for classroom teachers on how to manage and work effectively with the additional adults in their classrooms. My book, Working Effectively with your Teaching Assistant (Bloomsbury, 2023), considers how to support effective communication between teachers and TAs so that they are able to work as a team to support children.

Developing a shared understanding of the roles of the teacher and TA throughout the lesson

In our book, The Inclusive Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2021), Daniel Sobel and I focus on the importance of using small tweaks and adaptions to support inclusion throughout the five phases of the lesson. This is key to the effective deployment of TAs. Many strategies can be used throughout the lesson, others are focused within a particular phase of the lesson.

The effective use of visuals is fundamental to supporting the understanding of language, focus on learning and promoting access to instructions throughout the lesson. A TA using symbols and/ or pre-printed pictures for regular instructions (e.g. writing the date) and/ or a quick sketch on a whiteboard for less regular instruction makes them easier for children to understand, recall and follow.

Equally, visuals are critical to support vocabulary development, comprehension and processing, particularly for any child with language or communication difficulties. While some children can access visuals independently, many need an adult to direct them towards the prompt and/or explain it to them, particularly when it is first introduced.

Supporting children’s sensory needs is another area where TAs should promote learning throughout the lesson. Many children struggle to sit still. Fidgeting and fiddling may support their engagement and learning. While the use of ‘wobble cushions’, ‘kick bands’ and fidget objects may improve some children’s focus, many still need regular movement breaks. In an ideal world, children would manage and organise these independently. However, many, particularly younger children, need to be supervised when they leave the classroom and supported to engage in the exercises, they need to help calm and self-regulate.

Throughout the lesson, a proactive TA can act as an ‘extra pair of eyes’ and identify who is or is not accessing the learning. This may be through formal observations with an agreed focus, e.g. the use of a particular strategy or ongoing informal observations. However, to be valuable, this needs to be shared with the class teacher.

Visual timetables are extensively used to support children throughout the day, but many benefit from a visual or written plan of what to expect in a lesson. TA support to create a timetable or written list that can be ticked off or, crossed off or rubbed out when the activity is finished is often key to supporting children through a lesson as it reduces the unexpected and enables them to plan.

Phase One of the lesson: Transition, entering the classroom and preparing to learn.

Unfortunately, many TAs will arrive with the children, making it difficult for them to support the transition into the room proactively. However, they can model explicitly the process of preparing to learn. Where possible, the TA can support the meet and greet for children. The process of saying ‘hello’ and making eye contact supports building effective relationships within the classroom and enables the adult to make a quick assessment of where children are and their readiness to learn. Some individuals need a personalised ‘meet and greet’, such as spending a few minutes with an adult, coming in earlier or later than their peers or completing a set activity, to feel safe in the classroom.