Teaching Assistant Pay

Stephen Morgan Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Morgan (Portsmouth South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for opening the debate. I also thank all those who have signed the petition for bringing this pressing matter to our attention.

I pay tribute to all teaching assistants and school support staff across the country for their hard work and dedication. The essential support that they provide is invaluable in shaping the lives and futures of our children. As a former teacher, my hon. Friend spoke with insight and expertise about the challenges that teaching assistants face and the invaluable role that they play in schools, tackling inequalities, supporting children who are falling behind, improving progress, helping with mental health interventions. I am also very grateful to her for basing her contribution on research and evidence, especially from the University of Portsmouth, in particular on the conditions caused by the pandemic, including the concerning levels of physical assault. I thank her again for securing this debate and for her excellent speech.

The quality of teaching is the most important influence on improving children’s outcomes and delivering to them a high-quality education. As we know, teaching assistants are an essential part of that, offering supervision and encouragement to pupils, supporting teachers and assisting classroom management, and organising and assisting with extracurricular activities, as well as helping at breaks and lunchtimes. TAs help to create an environment that is conducive for effective teaching and learning, and they are a fundamental part of our education system. I also pay tribute to the extraordinary dedication of teaching assistants during the covid pandemic, supporting vulnerable children and the children of key workers. It is difficult to see how our school system would have managed without them.

Unfortunately, despite the integral role that they play, TAs and the wider teaching profession have been consistently overlooked and undervalued by this Government. According to a survey this year by the National Education Union, three out of every four TAs are routinely working out-of-contract hours and nearly half of TAs undertake cover supervision.

Increasingly, we hear stories of TAs leaving the profession to take up better-paid jobs elsewhere, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gower stated earlier. Even more worryingly, support staff are turning increasingly to food banks, as confirmed by the charity Education Support in The Times Educational Supplement today, to cope with the cost of living crisis. Yet despite these struggles, many teaching assistants are still helping struggling pupils from their own pocket with food, uniform and school supply costs, as I have seen at first hand from visiting schools across the country.

It is no surprise that school support staff vacancies have almost doubled since the start of the pandemic, with schools being forced to turn to supply teaching assistants from recruitment agencies to fill those vacancies, which eats further into their tight budgets. Indeed, recent analysis by my party has found that schools have spent £8 billion on such fees since 2010.

Support staff shortages hit those areas with more poorer pupils the hardest, as they often include schools with the largest class sizes and the most need for individualised support. The loss of school support staff also disproportionately impacts students with special educational needs, as we heard earlier, because they rely on vital one-to-one support and are often in need of additional pastoral care. Since 2010, TAs have been pushed into responsibilities that go way beyond their contract and job description, often picking up the pieces for overstretched teachers, acting as cover or stepping in for school nurses.

Cuts to youth services and wraparound services since 2010 have also placed a heavy burden on schools. And in the midst of a mental health crisis among our young people, TAs are often out of their depth and overwhelmed. Morale in the sector is not helped when senior Government Ministers describe school support staff in derogatory terms or when the Education Secretary refuses to confront reality and says that reports of teaching assistants leaving for supermarket jobs are “untrue”. When we factor in the increased stress alongside the erosion of pay and conditions, it is not a mystery why many teaching assistants are looking elsewhere for work.

Although the Government do not directly determine the pay of TAs in all schools, they are responsible for investing in authorities and schools that often decide the pay scale. Also, the Government’s inability to grow the economy or run our public services effectively has had a clear impact. In schools, budgets remain below 2010 levels and when budgets are extremely tight, teaching assistants—much to the regret of school leadership—are often the first jobs to be cut.

The impact of these cuts are felt across the school, but they are mostly felt by those children who need the most support, which is likely to be part of the reason why the attainment gap is widening at all stages of children’s learning and is now at its widest in a decade.

Labour is determined to fix this. We will do so by tackling head-on the recruitment and retention crises with school leaders, ensuring that every child has world-class teaching; by valuing rather than belittling the teaching profession, supporting teaching staff to develop as experts in their field; and by recognising and respecting the work of our school support staff, who deliver crucial learning support, especially for children who face the greatest barriers to engaging with education. We will once again make teachers and TAs feel valued and appreciated for the work that they do.

We will work with schools and school leaders to tackle the workloads, expanding the workforce to deliver optimal support for pupils and alleviate strain on staff, which will also be aided by reforming Ofsted. The next Labour Government will provide better working conditions for all workers, including teaching assistants. We want to learn from other professions how they structure pay, progression and ongoing training, to attract and retain the workforce. Our new deal for working people will ensure fair pay and job security for all. We will value every worker and ensure that their skills and expertise are acknowledged and appreciated. We will also provide better training and support structures, to ensure that workers are not pushed out of bounds of their contract.

To ensure that children receive the best possible education, it is crucial that we stand behind those who support them. Teaching assistants deserve to be treated fairly and paid fairly. They deserve to be respected, trusted and appreciated by a Government who recognise the sacrifices that they have made and continue to make to support the children across the country who face the greatest barriers to learning. What they do not deserve is to be overstretched and undervalued by a Government who do not prioritise their needs. The impact of that adversarial attitude on children’s learning has been clear to see.

Therefore, I hope that the Minister, in his response today, will outline what his Department is doing to tackle the growing number of vacancies among school support staff, to retain the excellent teaching assistants currently supporting children across our country’s schools and to once again make the role of teaching assistant valued and respected, as it was under the last Labour Government. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all speakers for contributing to today’s debate.