Classroom Struggle: Working in a South London School

In reading the article, there's this really interesting combination of work that should be socially valuable or socially important and is actually being done in a really bad way.

That, that's one of the things that comes through.

You talk about you became a teaching assistant because you wanted to do something socially useful, but then you were forced to work in a way that was not only pointless, but often in these training sessions you discovered actually half-arsed interventions are often like worse than nothing, right? And, and yet this is all you're being forced to do.

You're being told by management to run around trying to offer help to people who have these education, health, and care plans, but you're not doing sufficiently what they actually need.

You're not designing one-to-one interventions that really meet their needs.

You're just kind of doing what you can and firefighting.

But that, it, it doesn't actually do what you want, right? I mean, you describe how rather than supporting students flourish, our job was reduced to scraping together whatever we could to help students get by.

And then later on, for a lot of the most part, the tasks we did in lessons felt like firefighting.

We were not helping students truly learn or grow, just helping them get through that lesson.

For instance, working with students who couldn't read or write felt particularly ridiculous.

We were instructed by the school to sit in their lessons and write notes for them, which they couldn't read afterwards anyway.

So there's this kind of regulatory compliance rather than actually education is the goal of why all the teaching assistants are employed, right?

EHC- EHCP plans, which are educational health and care plans, are something that basically students can get if they have certain needs.

They're actually quite difficult to get.

They set the threshold quite high, and sort of the way education works in this country is if you basically don't get one by the time you're at end primary school, you're probably not gonna get one.

So it's usually kids where certain needs have been, have been identified quite early on, and there's a legal requirement for there to be a teaching assistant in all of the sort of core subject classes, so English, science, maths, of the students who had an EHCP.

So we were basically there to cover that, and our timetables were completely full.

They basically had the bare minimum number of staff possible to cover that.

It, it still wasn't enough.

They were still definitely, like, not meeting the legal requirements of, of what was needed for that.

It also created a bit of, a bit of a sticky situation where there were students who had EHCPs for many, many years who perhaps didn't need assistance in every lesson, could actually do without it in most, maybe some particular subjects.

And then there were students who did have greater needs, but for whatever reason, you know, issues at home, not attentive enough teachers at certain points in their lives, whatever, didn't have one, who did need a lot more assistance and, and w-wouldn't be prioritized based upon that.

It kind of felt like a flawed system from the start.

And yeah, when we're doing these sort of trainings on working with children with special educational needs, the number one thing that was basically repeated to us all the time was that you should not be spending more than 50% of your time in the classroom, and you should not be going into a classroom blind.

Every single lesson that you go into with a student with, like, sort of complex educational needs, uh, or special educational needs, you should have a plan for what you're gonna do in that lesson.