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Schools simply cannot manage without them...

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It takes a team of professionals to educate and support our children in school. Helen Osgood says it is time to begin treating – and paying – our support staff like the professionals they are


There still exists a misconception that everyone who works in a school is a teacher. This is the same misconception that believes hospitals are only filled with doctors and nurses, and that criminals are only caught by police officers – it is not the whole truth.

The reality is that every school, hospital, and police station is staffed by a range of dedicated and highly trained professionals – occupational health practitioners, ICT technicians, finance assistants, caretaking, and site staff…

The reality is that we simply cannot manage without our support staff.

I recently wrote in SecEd about the value of libraries and the positive impact that librarians have on pupils in schools. Other support staff play similarly crucial roles.

If you are a teacher or headteacher, imagine not having a clean classroom or having overflowing bins every morning; imagine not having the necessary resources because orders have not been placed, or having to set-up and tidy the science experiment yourself because there are no technicians.

And yet, the crisis in staffing in our schools is perhaps affecting our support staff most keenly. Research by SchoolDash last year (see Walker, 2022) shows that the number of support staff vacancies has doubled in the three years from 2018/19 to 2021/22.

Many experienced teaching assistants and support staff have noted that they can get better pay for less workload and less stress working in supermarkets and the like. But, of course, this exodus serves only to increase the stress and workload for those left behind.

For example, pupil wellbeing is a significant problem at the moment as readers will know only too well – with various polls and studies showing an increase in things like self-harm, suicidal thoughts and eating difficulties among secondary age students.

We also know that getting timely access to specialist support for those with mental health needs is difficult to say the least, leaving a majority of children and young people without the help they need and leaving schools – and quite often support staff – to pick up the pieces.

This is why the pastoral support role is so important – especially in the aftermath of the pandemic with the rise in absenteeism and school avoidance that we are all seeing.

The wide-ranging role of pastoral staff can include encouraging reluctant students into school, as well as supporting PSHE, mending pupils’ inter-personal relationships, resolving disputes with parents, organising assemblies, leading interventions – the list is endless.

Without them children’s wellbeing would surely suffer, and this is just one area of school life where support staff play a crucial role.

A specialist SEND assistant is quite likely to have a greater understanding of the needs of the children they work with every day than the class teacher.

Similarly, in the school kitchen it takes real skill to prepare nutritious food for a whole school on a restricted budget. And what about our school business managers who work behind the scenes keeping schools functioning and who work miracles in dealing with competing priorities and financial pressures?

We need our support staff, but we must enable them to remain working in our schools. That’s why it is so important that we recognise support staff for who they are and what they do. They are skilled professionals, and sometimes employers overlook this fact.

And of course, we cannot talk support staff without talking teaching assistants. According to the National Careers Service, a teaching assistant will carry out day-to-day tasks such as “record and report the progress students make” and “work with students to make sure they understand”, as well as supporting behavioural, pastoral, and other needs. And all this for £19,000!

If this sounds remarkably like the role of a classroom teacher, that’s because the two roles are so inextricably intertwined that, without teaching assistants, the standard of education across schools would surely suffer.

It is time that these workers are recognised as the professionals they are, given the rights and responsibilities of “professionals”, and rewarded for the work they do with salaries that recognise their knowledge, skill, and experience, rather than just paying them the minimum wage or worse.

Back in 2016, the Department for Education (DfE) commissioned a set of standards for teaching assistants and higher-level teaching assistants but eventually decided not to publish them.

But they are available to download (see further information) and sit well alongside the statutory standards for teachers and headteachers. They are also supported by recommendations made in the Education Endowment Foundation’s Making best use of teaching assistants report (Sharples et al, 2015).

A set of professional standards is the first step in recognising the impact that support staff have on pupils and in schools. But it is about more than this. Professional standards lift the status of support staff, from “assistant” to “professional”, with all the associated kudos that brings.

Professional standards support arguments for national employment standards and pay frameworks which better reflect the work of these key staff.

Does this all seem like a dream? Not so – in Wales discussions are on-going to devise a new set of professional standards for classroom support staff, and for them to be supported in their roles with dedicated training and CPD (Welsh government, 2022).

Minister for education and Welsh language, Jeremy Miles, said: “Teaching assistants have long highlighted concerns in relation to their roles in schools, ranging from access to training, deployment, and terms and conditions. As part of my commitment to support the vital work of our teaching assistants, work is progressing to respond to these concerns with our social partners.”

Solutions like this require time and money. And with dwindling budgets and rising costs, schools do have to choose carefully how to make ends meet. But where there is a will there is a way – because it takes a whole team to educate a child.

  • Helen Osgood is national officer for education and early years with Community Union. Read her previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-osgood0


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