The National Teacher Research Panel was set up about 15 years ago by CUREE supported by a group of national education agencies most of which no longer exist. It had three main goals:
- To ensure that all research in education takes account of the teacher perspective
- To ensure a higher profile for research and evidence informed practice in government, academic and practitioner communities
- To increase the number of teachers engaged in and with the full spectrum of research activity.
Over the several years of its existence, the Panel, supported by its expert advisers in CUREE, has helped and encouraged dozens of teachers and school leaders to do high quality but practical research. The Panel also helped them report their findings succinctly, in plain English and focused on relevance to other practitioners. This is one such example of that work.
The number of teaching assistants (TAs) in schools has increased dramatically in recent years. At the same time there has been a large increase in the number of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools, and increased numbers of pupils identified as in need of support by school staff. In 2003 Peter Blatchford and his research team explored the way TAs were deployed at that time and the impact they had on teaching and learning. This new Research for Teachers updates the picture presented by the earlier research findings, by summarising more recent research by a team led by the same principal researcher. Blatchford's later research provides a wide range of data including, for example, support staff characteristics, conditions of employment, training and experience, as well as an analysis of the impact of TA support in the classroom, in what amounts to the largest study yet undertaken on support staff. This summary is focused on those aspects of Blatchford's research relating most directly to teaching and learning. It includes evidence about the impact of TAs on pupil engagement and the individual attention pupils received in class, as well as pupils' academic progress over a school year. This Research for Teachers is based mainly on The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS)* project which covered primary, secondary and special schools in England and Wales. We have also included some data from a recent EPPI review* by Alborz et al (2009) that systematically analysed 232 studies for evidence about the impact of adult support staff on the participation and learning of pupils and on mainstream schools. This review provides additional detail about the work and impact of TAs, and the processes that support learning. Whilst Blatchford's research constitutes an analysis based on the way TAs are routinely deployed, the Alborz review provides a focus on TAs as they are used during targeted interventions. Blatchford's recent study found that whilst the use of TAs was linked with a positive effect on pupils' engagement with their learning, there was a consistent negative relationship between the amount of TA support and pupils' academic progress. Whilst the involvement of TAs led to greater individual attention for pupils, particularly those with SEN or in need of additional support, the researchers also found that classroom support from TAs had the unintentional consequence that the amount of teacher-pupil contact declined if a TA was present. In other words, support provided by TAs was inversely related to the amount of support from teachers. This Research for Teachers will be helpful to school leaders involved in deploying TAs and to teachers who work with TAs in the classroom. The findings from the research could help schools focus on what to do to make the use of TAs more effective for both teachers and pupils. They also point to a need for schools to query the balance of attention, of teachers and TAs, towards those children most in need of support for their learning. *The research reports used for this RfT were:Blatchford, P., Bassett, P., Brown, P., Koutsoubou, M., Martin, P., Russell, A. & Webster, R. with Rubie-Davies, C. (2009) The Impact of Support Staff in Schools. Results from the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project. Strand 2 Wave 2. DCSF. The authors have also developed a Wider Pedagogical Role (WPR) model to summarise and explain their findings. You'll find more information about this and their other TA related projects in the Further Reading section. Alborz, A., Pearson, D., Farrell, P. & Howes, A. (2009) The impact of adult support staff on pupils and mainstream schools. Technical Report. In: Research Evidence in Education Library. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London.
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