Stephen Willoughby
UCL Independant Educational Consultant
I am an educationist with a passionate interest in Equalities and School Leadership developed over 30 years working within mainstream and special schools. I continue to schools as a private consultant. Born an albino with visual disabilities I had personal and intellectual reasons to pursue my career in teaching and learning and thereafter to undertake research within schools. I continue to work in schools as a private consultant.
The number of Teaching Assistants (TAs) in schools has risen dramatically since the late 1990s. Whilst they may be an essential educational asset to schools; without in-service training opportunities, they will continue to have limited career chances. There is no direct pathway through TA qualification framework towards qualified teacher status. Our proposal examines the effectiveness of policy and practice on TA status and strucuture.
Our aim is to deepen understanding of TA status and structure. The questions are:
- There is a lack of status and structure for TAs at the national level. How and why is this situation maintained?
- How and why is this current lack of status maintained and/or challenged at the school level?
The first question considers the interaction of government, Ofsted and professional agencies. Our second question particularly focuses on school governance/leadership and TA Voice.
The research context is TA policy and practice at national and local levels. Major concerns at national level include training; pay grades and retention. It examines TA policy history and discusses possible future developments? For instance, the Labour Government (1997-2010) supported limited TA development, whereas the present Conservative Government does not. The local context involves the examination of the role of TAs within a school community.
The focus is on how school leadership adapts to or resists national policy. Our conceptual framework examines the interaction of governance, leadership and policy. We define governance as the processes of governing a school both formally and informally based on influence, laws, codes and norms. School governance involves a democratic governing body that ratifies, scrutinises, and requires accountability by the school. (Baxter 2016). We conceptualise leadership as a continuum from wicked problems to tame but complicated processes; the elements of leadership/management are leaders, followers and situation which interact over time (Spillane 2006). Finally, we describe the term ‘policy’ as a long-term term strategy or a vision rather than short-term operational cycles.
The methodology utilizes both a qualitative case study approach involving five schools and quantitatively a wider range of state schools. Both methods focus on governance and leadership of school TA policy and consider the similarities and differences within and between establishment practices. For example, qualitative case study analysis will involve in-depth semi-structured interviewing, whereas quantitative examination will target a wider collection of documentary data such as Ofsted inspection reports across the UK.
