4 minute read
Meet the speaker
Sally Franklin is a co-ordinator of the EEF-funded Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) project, a Senior Teaching Fellow based in the Centre for Inclusive Education, UCL Institute of Education, and a SEND consultant, supporting schools both in the UK and internationally to improve their practice.
She will lead a workshop at our upcoming Inclusion for All Conference on 1 July 2022 focused on maximising the use of TAs in schools, based on research. Read on to learn more about Sally's work and what you can expect from her workshop at the conference.
Q&A with Sally Franklin
Q: What can we expect from your workshop at the Inclusion for All conference?
A: I’ll be running three workshops across the day which will be focused on the effective deployment of TAs, based on the research and evidence we’ve collected over the last 15 years. I’ll be sharing ideas about good practice, strategic deployment decisions and how to tackle the challenges that senior leaders face when deploying support staff.
Whilst we understand the critical role that TAs play in supporting pupils with SEND in mainstream schools, research suggest that the way that we deploy and prepare TAs for their role is critical to the impact they can have on pupil progress. As budgets become even further stretched and the numbers of pupils with SEND in mainstream schools increases, it becomes even more important to ensure we’re making best use of this essential workforce. I’ll introduce a framework to help rethink how TAs can be better deployed and prepared, and trained to interact with pupils to scaffolding learning.
Q: What was the catalyst for the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) research?
A: The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff in Schools (DISS) project was the catalyst for MITA. The DISS project is the largest study of teaching assistants and other school support staff carried out in the world, named by the British Educational Research Association as one of 40 landmark studies to have had a significant impact on education in last 40 years. The results were published in 2009 and widely reported, and found that the more support pupils received from TAs, the less progress they made – especially those with special educational needs. Crucially, these results were not attributable to either pupil characteristics (i.e. prior attainment or SEN status) or anything TAs were doing. Instead, it was the way schools and teachers deployed and prepared TAs – factors that are out of TAs’ control – that best explained the surprising results.
Following studies, including the Making a Statement (MaST) and Special Educational Needs in Secondary Education (SENSE) studies on the everyday educational experiences of pupils with high-level SEN in primary and secondary schools cast further doubt on the sustainability of a model of inclusion that is almost fully dependent on the use of TAs.
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing schools when it comes to effective deployment of TAs in the classroom?
A: Recruitment and retention of staff continues to be a significant challenge for schools as well as the availability of high-quality training and support for TAs. However, perhaps the biggest challenge centres around the logistics of trying to deploy staff across the high level of pupil need in mainstream schools.
Our response to SEND in the UK is centred around the use of additional adults, but as numbers of pupils with SEND increases, we are beginning to see number of TAs reducing for the first time in over 15 years, placing huge pressures on schools. Schools are busy, dynamic and complex environments and deployment decisions are often based on who and what we have available at any given moment, which can mean that pupils might not always get the level of support they need. It’s important that school teams work collaboratively to ensure that the expectations of staff are clear and there is a shared and consistent understanding of what the TA role is and isn’t.
Attend Sally's workshop at our Inclusion for All Conference on 1 July at The Tomlinson Centre.