Teaching Assistant Pay

Robin Walker Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I do not plan to speak at length but am happy to speak briefly. I very much welcome the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) making the case for teaching assistants, and I should declare a family interest: I am the brother of a teaching assistant who works in special educational needs setting. I recognise the incredibly important work that teaching assistants do, which the hon. Lady has encapsulated well.

We would all like to see everyone in the education system better paid for what they do and their activities recognised, but I want to highlight the specific challenge, particularly for our special educational needs schools, when it comes to funding teaching assistants. In the recently announced pay offer, which I strongly welcome, we saw an improvement to the usual situation in that the offer covers not just schools, but further education; that is very welcome. The challenge, though, is that when successive Governments have funded teachers’ pay, they have not provided the same support for schools when it comes to teaching assistants’ pay. Even the lower increases that we have seen through the local authority pay bands have not been funded by the Treasury and the Department for Education in the same way that the teachers’ pay increases have over the years. That has increased the pressure on schools, particularly special educational needs schools, such as Fort Royal Primary School in my constituency, which have to—quite rightly, in order to meet need—employ a large number of teaching assistants.

I know that the Minister for Schools, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), will quite rightly point out that the Government have more than doubled high needs funding—I welcome that and know there is significantly more money going into the area—but that doubling of funding is in response to demand and to what the Children’s Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), has acknowledged is a rising level of need in our schools. I speak in this debate to urge my right hon. Friend the Schools Minister to consider how, particularly with our special educational needs schools, but also with our mainstream schools that are supporting more and more children with SEN, we can ensure that pay awards reach teaching assistants and, crucially, that they are fully and properly funded; otherwise, we will have a situation where, in order for schools to meet their commitments to teachers’ pay and other areas they want to support through investment, they unfortunately have to cut back on the very important work of teaching assistants.

I join the hon. Member for Gower in recognising the quality, quantity and range of teaching assistants’ work, and the important role they play in supporting inclusion. The Education Committee has looked at the issue of persistent absence in school, and we have found that inclusion is crucial. Making sure that children’s needs are met is a crucial part of ensuring they can continue to attend school. I do not pretend that this is an easy area; on one small point of defence—the White Paper, which I co-wrote, did mention the work of teaching assistants in a couple of areas, as hon. Lady pointed out, but it also talked about apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships, which are a real opportunity to build a route of progression for teaching assistants. I have seen some very interesting schools that have found teaching assistants, sports assistants and meal assistants who are able and excited to move up into the teaching profession, and those schools have provided support for them to do so and a route for further progression. I would love the Government to look at what further routes of progression could be built for teaching assistants so that more of them can go on—perhaps when the children have grown up and flown the nest, as is the case for my sister—into a career in teaching.