Teaching Assistants

Debate between Alex Cunningham and David Simpson

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham]

Yes, that is most certainly the case. Many years ago my wife was a volunteer assistant with adult literacy. I recognise so much the benefit of one-to-one opportunities for children with particular needs, including language and numeracy, who can benefit tremendously if they have that face-to-face contact with a teaching assistant.

The report by the Institute of Education, “Deployment and Impact of Support Staff in Schools”, was surprising, in that it found a negative relationship between the amount of teaching assistant support and academic progress in students. Similarly, Reform’s report also suggested that as much as £1.7 billion could be saved each year, through reducing the costs associated with teaching assistants, and repeatedly contended that teaching assistants

“have a negligible effect on educational outcomes”,

and even claiming that their interventions can

“harm a child’s education”.

However, these findings are very much the result of a Government who focus squarely on resource allocation and productivity per pound spent, rather than on actual educational outcomes and opportunities provided. To put it another way, this is ideologically driven attentiveness to cost at the expense of value. Indeed, several articles last summer reinforced this point. A piece in The Sunday Times, for instance, appearing in the run-up to the comprehensive spending review, argued that teaching assistants should be cut, as the evidence suggests that they do not have a positive impact on pupil attainment. In a similar fashion, an article in the Daily Mail also reported that officials from the Treasury and the Department for Education were considering mass reductions in the number of teaching assistants working in our classrooms, citing an effort to

“save some of the £4 billion a year spent on them”.

Again, the focus was primarily on finances, with the article suggesting that schools

“could improve value for money by cutting the number of teaching assistants and increasing class sizes”.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

Further to the point made earlier with regard to special needs, the special needs schools in my constituency have expressed to me that they could not survive without classroom assistants—teaching assistants—who are invaluable. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that more effort needs to be made to give them encouragement that there is a career for them and that they may, perhaps, move on to full-time teaching?

[Alex Cunningham]

It is down to training and the quality of the teaching assistants. If we can help them develop their careers properly, with ongoing professional development—I will mention that later—it will add real value for special needs children and children across the piece.