Solutions: Maximising your teaching assistants team

As schools plan to mark National Teaching Assistants’ Day, at Ninestiles we are celebrating the great work of ours. Thanks to them, attendance in our Resource Base is high, with two-thirds of learners achieving over 96 per cent attendance across the year, results are strong and we have won multiple awards for inclusion and parent partnerships. Here’s how we’ve achieved all that.

Our Birmingham academy is home to a wide spectrum of learners, a significant number of whom need additional support. This can be because they have special educational needs, English as an additional language or a range of other issues.

As a result, our Resource Base has always enjoyed a more generous level of teaching assistant support than some settings. We have worked hard to maximise their impact, building a highly-skilled and highly-motivated team to support our most vulnerable children and young people.

Mapping need and potential

Our first step was to assess need and identify potential solutions. Like many schools, Ninestiles is an inclusive school working hard to support more children with complex needs, at a time of system-wide cuts.

Our Resource Base is critical to helping all children and young people achieve their best academic outcomes and ensuring they are well prepared for adulthood. As a senior team, we wanted to support this in a manageable way for all staff members and their workloads. Therefore, maximising the potential impact of our teaching assistants was a priority.

Empowering responsibility 

The teaching assistants included a number of experienced colleagues whose knowledge was somewhat under-utilised.

Working one-on-one with learners each day, they knew them better than anyone and enjoyed trusting relationships with parents and carers. So we gave them responsibility for their own pool of students, including to track progress, set targets and report to parents and carers.

This boosted morale and also improved care for learners, providing a more resilient end-to-end offer that meant every opportunity to support a child could be identified. There have been other benefits too, including for student reviews to be conducted in parents’ or carers’ home languages, like Urdu and Pashto.

Strengthening practice

As responsibilities evolved, so too did expectations. The team was eager to ensure it was delivering best practice. So we have introduced many of the approaches outlined in the work of the EEF, and Durham University’s ‘Maximising Teaching Assistants’ research.

We have a particular focus on frequent structured meetings, responsive groupings within the classroom, and we recognise the importance of life skills, from tying shoe laces to practising shopping at the local supermarket.   

Improving CPD

Working with specialists at our trust’s Professional Learning Institute, we developed a rigorous programme of CPD, including training to help colleagues improve their classroom practice or skills in other areas of education.

Moreover, the team was keen to establish itself as a pool of experts supporting children with high needs. Over time, they have developed specific specialisms. For example, in speech, language and occupational therapy, as well as trauma-informed and safeguarding practice.

We now also offer better progression and a recognised career pathway to our teaching assistants. We encourage colleagues to take their Higher Level Teaching Assistant qualification, visit other institutions in our trust family and professional network, and we support promotion within the wider trust.

Re-booting recruitment

With staff members flourishing, promotion and progression has been a natural step for our longer-serving colleagues. We see this as positive, as it serves to strengthen the wider local authority SEND and social care eco-system.

Meanwhile, we are determined to maintain a high-performing team, so we require new staff members to join via three routes: enrol on the graduate trainee scheme, bring special school experience or hold Qualified Teacher Status.

This ambition and skillset is helping ensure we can continue to meet the expectations of the role.

Our Ninestiles community is very positive, as recognised in our Leading Parent Partnership Award, given for “exemplary inclusion practice”, and the Pearson Silver Award Sharfa Chohan received for leading transition for new year 7 students to the Resource Base last year.  

At the same time, we have achieved a consistent positive Progress 8 score for Resource Base learners, who achieve high GCSE grades.

Excellent teaching assistant support means that a child’s circumstance is not a barrier to opportunity at Ninestiles. It also means we can continue to offer enrichment opportunities to our children and young people – including to facilitate one of our neurodiverse learners, who had a special interest in politics, to join Jess Phillips MP on a trip to Parliament.

And all of that is surely worth celebrating.