![]() ![]() The university has been condemned over its lack of accommodation provision as students were warned not to enrol in courses or travel to the city if they were unable to secure a flat in advance. One Glasgow University staff member has branded the housing shortage “a disgrace” and said students are being sent into the “wild wild west” of private lets. She will be speaking about SEND leadership at the Tes SEND Show 2022, held on 7-8 October.A one-bed flat available for £900 per month in Glasgow had more than 500 applications within hours of going online as desperate university students in the city face being left homeless. Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders If we don’t make this our focus, the vulnerable children who rely on TA support will be the ones who suffer the most. Flat icon glue professional#It’s time to shape a more attractive, respectful and professional environment that encourages TAs to stay. We need the knowledge TAs acquire about the pupils they support to give feedback to the teachers. The government’s ambition to strengthen quality teaching to support the progress of all is a good one, but it’s not sufficient. The report concluded that the role had been transformed “potentially forever”. The report also found massively expanded responsibilities, from helping students who had fallen behind, to filling in for specialists, such as speech and language therapists. If not, they will disappear from the school landscape, and it won’t just be the financial squeeze that is to blame.Ī recent report from the University of Portsmouth, commissioned by Unison, found that the pandemic had led to “marked increases in workload and their emotional load pre-pandemic”. Instead, we should treat them as co-experts in the classroom: a precious commodity to be planned for carefully and respectfully. It puts a ceiling on the professionalism of TAs. Such firefighting leads to the poor outcomes we know to be a consequence of poor deployment. To maximise this role, we have to break some habits.Īs one colleague put it: “I never know when a TA is going to ‘rock up’ so I can’t plan for them.” However, the TA said: “I want to be consistent in that class but I don’t know where I will be sent at a minute’s notice.” The key thing to acknowledge here is the strategic role the TA plays in school life - working alongside the class teacher to support inclusion. Why we need to talk about structural exclusionĪt the upcoming Tes SEND Show, I’ll be running a workshop on the implications of the SEND Green Paper for TAs in schools.What does the future look like for alternative provision?.Who leads SEND? The answer should be: everyone.In other words, they rely on the TA community to fill significant gaps without them, the vision of the SEND review for “right time, right place” simply falls flat. It’s this time, and access to additional expertise, that schools scrabble to keep hold of. ![]() ![]() Some children need more time and greater scaffolding, both academically and socially. Good adaptive teaching that opens up the curriculum for all children will be essential.Īll of this must be complemented by effectively deployed TAs. To support this, we will need significant resource and effective inclusion practices. The SEND Green Paper makes a stronger commitment than ever to ensuring more children with complex needs are educated in mainstream schools. They knit together important relationships and bring knowledge of a child with special educational needs or disabilities to the teacher. They matter for children, for parents and for teachers. This has serious consequences for vulnerable children in the classroom. We are facing a huge shortage in TAs as many seek more profitable and less stressful employment elsewhere, and as headteachers are forced to make staffing cuts as a result of ongoing budget pressures, exacerbated by the government’s unfunded teacher pay rise commitments and the energy crisis. Teaching assistants represent around 25 per cent of the school workforce in the UK.įor now, there are around 380,000 of them, but that number is under threat. ![]()
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