Teaching assistants will be able to train as SEND specialists through a new apprenticeship that could also open up a new route to becoming a teacher.
The level 5 specialist teaching assistant apprenticeship – equivalent to a foundation degree – will offer support staff the chance to specialise in either SEND, social and emotional wellbeing or curriculum provision.
At present, the only apprenticeship for assistants (TAs) is at level 3, equivalent to A-levels.
Sector leaders see the move as positive. They can dip into the apprenticeship levy to fund it, it opens up another route for new teachers and can help with the explosion of pupils with additional needs.
Unison, which represents more than 200,000 school support staff, said it could make a “real difference” – but warned apprentices “must be paid at the going rate for the job and there should be no teaching on the cheap”.
Equip TAs for SEND crisis
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education rubber-stamped the new standard this month and recommended a £12,000 funding band, now subject to government approval.
“It’s an innovative space. It’s opening up an opportunity,” said Diane Swift, co-chair of the trailblazer group.
Employers with an annual wage bill of more than £3 million must pay 0.5 per cent of that bill into the apprenticeship levy. But a lack of routes for staff can mean many schools struggling to spend it.
The apprenticeship will also be open to a range of support roles that do not have TA in the title, such as learning support mentors, and will take from 12 to 24 months.
Providers will need to develop the programme and some will have to apply to be on the register for the apprenticeship, so their courses are unlikely to launch before next September.
But Educational and Sporting Futures said its programme will launch in January if not before.
Participants will spend 80 per cent of their time learning on the job and a minimum of six hours a week off-site for training.
Andy Ogden, the co-chair of the trailblazer group and director for CPD at Tarka Learning Partnership, said it was an answer to the “increasingly complex needs of some of the most vulnerable children.
“[It] equips the people who are dealing day in and day out with them to be able to meet those needs in a much better way and to feel confident in the role that they’re doing.”
Nearly one in five youngsters now has special needs.
Boost retention, cost effective
Those behind the apprenticeship have also said it could be aligned with other qualifications, allowing trainees to gain a foundation degree.
It could also boost retention by offering those who have completed the “more generalist” level 3 apprenticeship the chance to “take their career to the next level”.
And TAs who are successful on the new course “may find that after a few years that they want to progress further” into teaching, Swift said.
At present there is only a postgraduate apprenticeship in teaching, although an undergraduate teaching apprenticeship is being developed.
Lift Schools, previously known as the Academies Enterprise Trust, said it would use the apprenticeship as “a cost-effective way” to offer career development.
“This defined progression route will also support the development of TAs who want to go on to become qualified teachers whilst developing specialist skills such as SEND within our schools,” a spokesperson said.
Teachers ‘on the cheap’?
But apprenticeships make unions nervous about pay as the minimum wage is £6.40 for under-19s and older apprentices in their first year, far below the national minimum of £11.44.
A National Foundation for Educational Research report last year also found 45 per cent of secondary and special schools and a third of primaries reported the salaries they felt able to offer were the single biggest barrier to TA recruitment.
The report also found the cost-of-living crisis has led to more TAs quitting classrooms to work in supermarkets or fast-food restaurants.
Mike Short, Unison’s head of education, said “school staff must be paid at the going rate for the job and there should be no teaching on the cheap”.
Swift insisted the apprenticeship was “absolutely not about ‘teachers on the cheap’.”
“The key to this apprenticeship is to value the specialist support layer of the workforce ecology that has often previously been under-served and under-recognised.””
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