I’ll start with a cliche: I have always wanted to become a teacher.

The desire to help shape young people’s lives, while embarking on an adventure through the great classical texts with eager-eyed students, had always been my ambition.

Indeed, that dream of being an inspiring, much-liked and respected teacher is often plastered on posters and advertisement campaigns for the profession and no doubt lures many in.

Certainly, sitting in one of the very first lectures of my PGCE with other fresh-faced teacher-wannabes, I would have still believed in that false prophecy - if it weren’t for my time as a teaching assistant.

Because, prior to my PGCE, I spent three years as a TA specialising in SEND at a secondary school in Bristol. Over those three years, the ideal of what it is like to be a teacher was thoroughly and comprehensively exploded.

Facing reality

The real-life barriers for students and teachers alike became quickly apparent; the sobering, harsh realities of almost zero budget to buy essential classroom equipment such as glue sticks meant most lessons felt like the final challenge of The Crystal Maze; a blizzard of spare sheets of paper flying everywhere the moment students opened their books.

Other highlights included disengaged students, low-level disruption and the feeling of a seven-week term dragging on for seven years. So, why did I bother going on to do a PGCE? I hear you ask. It was simple: I loved it.

Being a TA exposed me to the storm of education, but it also taught me how to weather it.

This type of familiarisation cannot be obtained in the short few days at a school that most PGCE suppliers recommend candidates seek before starting teacher training.

I would recommend anyone looking to becoming a teacher to begin as a TA first for a decent amount of time, at least a term.

Worth the effort 

I acknowledge that termly contracts are extremely rare, and, in most cases, a yearly contract would be the least you would expect. TA posts themselves can also be scarce, depending on the time of the year.

Despite this, becoming a TA is something for teacher-wannabes to seriously consider for a number of reasons.

I have lost count of the number of times the knowledge I gained during my time as a TA came in handy during my own teacher training. This ranged from how to build rapport with challenging students to alternative methods of getting sheets of paper to stay in books without the handy glue stick.

I also felt comforted by the fact that I had already become accustomed to school culture, which may not have been the case for some of my cohort. This included simple things such as just how loud a school can be, standing in front of and being surrounded by many pairs of eyes, the rigidness of the school day itself and high levels of social interaction.

A huge headstart

Other advantages include that I already had a firm grip on curriculum and had observed countless lessons, enabling me to cherry-pick classroom techniques, as well as building a solid foundation of knowledge that I could bring into my own practice, lowering my learning curve in comparison to other student teachers.

Many student teachers were required to constantly reinvent the wheel, spending many hours on lesson plans and PowerPoint presentations. In comparison, I already had a bank of presentations and lessons I had acquired during my time as a TA that I could then draw upon during my PGCE. 

Another essential tool that being a TA taught me was how to help EAL students and children with SEND, both in the classroom and in small interventions. My experience opened my eyes to the range of SEND needs there are and how best to help them. This is not something you can easily pick up in a few days - or indeed even within the full-on teacher training course itself.

The amount of pressure and number of tasks that are demanded from you during teacher training is incredibly high. That workload may well contribute towards student teachers dropping out of the course, either through culture shock or realising that becoming a teacher is not for them.

Real advantages

Perhaps dropout numbers could be reduced, or even prevented completely, if an extended period within a school setting were to be made mandatory pre-PGCE.

In short, becoming a TA pre-PGCE will provide any teacher-wannabe with a set of tools which they can then sharpen within their own practice during teacher training.

After all, it’s a lot easier to navigate the storm if you’ve already travelled through the terrain.

Jason Gillman is a former TA and current student teacher of English at the University of Bristol. He tweets @jason_gillman.