The bell had gone on another Friday afternoon in school and a teaching assistant and I were comparing levels of exhaustion.
“I’ve just realised I haven’t had a drink since seven this morning,” I told her as I lunged at the tea urn.
“I’ve given up trying to fit in drink stops,” the teaching assistant told me. “I’ve just worked out that this week I’ve taken the whole class on my own for 70 per cent of the time.”
“You’re not serious?” I said. “That’s more than I’ve done” (I work part-time).
She shrugged. This couldn’t be right. For nearly three-quarters of their week, these children had been taught by someone who, although the most effective of TAs, is an unqualified teacher, who had not planned the lessons she was delivering, would not be marking and assessing them, and had not signed up for any of this.
While this was obviously not a typical week, it did make me wonder how much time some children spend without their teacher in the room and why. (Ironically, in this case, the teacher was absent partly to conduct classroom drop-ins to ensure no teaching time was being wasted or used ineffectually.)
TAs ‘left holding the reins’
Since expectations of TAs have increased, it has become common for them to be timetabled in for some whole-class cover. When planned carefully, this can work well. TAs know the children and often have a variety of skills that they can bring to the classroom.
But there are also times when they are left holding the reins at a moment’s notice: when the teacher is called away mid-lesson, in a computing session when the wi-fi has evaporated, at the end of a wet day when noise levels and tensions are running high. To add insult to injury, they don’t even have a TA to help them.
How much time do some children spend without their teacher in the room?
It is clearly far from ideal but it sometimes seems unavoidable. If you are both a classroom teacher and a senior leader or Sendco, then you are essentially doing at least two full-time jobs, usually with just a sliver of extra non-contact time to fit everything in.
Which means something’s got to give. Even the multitasking ninjas that are today’s primary staff can’t be in two places at once; when there’s a behaviour crisis or an emergency safeguarding meeting and the deputy head or Sendco has to exit the classroom sharpish, it is usually the TA who is left to pick up the reins.
However hard the school tries to prevent it, when budgets are squeezed, everyone has to spread themselves more thinly. I love TAs, they do a great job, but I don’t believe they are the answer when demands on teachers to deliver on policies, paperwork and data block them from doing the most important part of their job: to stand in front of their class and teach.
Jo Brighouse is a primary school teacher in the Midlands
