(cc image by The Majestic Fool)

I’ve got a big dilemma at the moment. Do I stay with what I’m doing or leap off the edge?

I’ve just spent a year teaching NCFE2 to a fine group of teaching assistants. I’ve built up lots of resources and lesson plans and I’d actually started to feel that I might just know what I’m doing.

Then whoosh, everything changes, again. The place I work isn’t offering NCFE2 next year, only NVQ 2 because of changes in funding. They propose that I just switch to that instead but NVQ2 is a very different proposition:

1. Ideally meant for those already employed, it is less easy for people on voluntary placements. Yet it is mostly volunteers that have already signed up for the course.
2. It involves a much higher commitment to placement observations than NCFE
3. No scope for simulations - everything has to happen in school, no role plays.
4. Much more involvement from placement schools and teachers. Hard to get for volunteers rather than staff members.
5. The dreaded grids need to be tracked, collated and generally understood by all concerned.
6. It’s just been revised and the text books are now all out of date.
7. I haven’t a clue how to organise the materials or sessions so I’d have to start again from scratch with my planning.

Add to this a higher tutor/ student ratio and I’m left wondering if this is going to be more trouble than it is worth.

All of this doesn’t even begin to address the other issues I have with teaching at the moment.

I have been totally unable to find any sort of online network of UK based peers interested in adult education at pre-degree level. No forums, bloggers, twitterers, ning groups, nix. So no personal learning network of peers again this year. (Nothing wrong with all my great primary school network but a few peers would be nice)

The paperwork is daunting, hard to keep on top of and NVQ has even more of it.

I hated the Preparing to Teach in the Life Long Learning Sector course with a vengeance. It was a real pain and had me tearing my hair out. Teaching NVQ would mean embarking on yet another course, this time for assessors of NVQs.

On the plus side I mostly enjoyed the actual teaching sessions, the interactions, watching people grow in confidence and competence. I quite enjoyed the school visits and learning to navigate my way round unfamiliar parts of London.

Not teaching next year feels very high risk. It means I’m totally dependant on my writing and my online activities to provide me with an income. The return might be that with more energy and input from me my other stuff really takes off.

Shall I jump and hope that I can fly?

(cc image by SFTC/Gill)

Unison finally noticed that teaching assistants are being used as cheap teachers:

Christine McAnea, of Unison, said the practice was “endemic” as it cost less to use support staff to cover teacher absence than to buy supply teachers.

England schools Minister Jim Knight said teaching assistants eased the burden on teachers, but should not lead classes “for more than a short period”

It costs about £150 a day to employ a supply teacher, but about £50 to pay support staff.

Rosemary Plummer, a Unison representative, said in the last few months more than 40 teaching assistants from a small area of London had told her they felt they were being asked to do more than they were qualified for.

“They’re delivering maths, they’re delivering literacy and marking work - that’s a teacher’s job… they’re being used as cut-price teachers,” she said.

You don’t say? Can you believe they’ve only just noticed? I don’t understand why is the NUT not screaming about this too, it is teachers they are replacing after all. Maybe supply and part time cover teachers don’t matter either.

Many teaching assistants are extremely competent but they are not teachers. I know TAs in primary who are doing all their own planning, target setting, and marking for the teachers whose PPA time they cover. For this they are paid only for the hours they actually teach, (no planning time), at Level 3 - not even HLTA rates, even though they are qualified to that level. They also have the joy of teaching with no support, which never happens to the normal teacher in that class.

source

“Every primary school should have a maths specialist and parents should have a less negative attitude to the subject”

According to the BBC an interim report by Sir Peter Williams says the UK is one of the few developed nations where it is acceptable to say you are “useless at maths”.

Such attitudes will not help children see maths as an essential and rewarding part of their daily lives,

The study suggests the amount of in-service maths training primary teachers receive is inadequate. Although most (I’d assumed it would be all by now) teachers do have the basic requirement in maths for teacher training - GCSE maths at C or above.

All HLTAs and many TAs also have to have maths GCSE in order to even be considered for a job.
The report had a go at parents as well. It says they needed to have a “can-do” attitude to maths and to learn the modern techniques their children were using to help them and give them a love of maths.

So what do we get from this? More initiatives and funding for family learning perhaps? Parents expected to not only support the children whilst they do homework but also to make time themselves to learn the techniques schools are using to teach maths? I’ve been involved in family learning in school before and they are great for those who do get involved. The trouble is it’s never the parents you really need to reach who turn up to them.

One of the biggest contrast I’m seeing at the moment though is between these attitudes and those of some of my Teaching Assistant students. Mostly educated in non-European countries they express a deep love of Maths and a high level of confidence in their own abilities. They have exactly the ‘can- do’ attitude the report wants to promote, understand that maths is vital to children’s learning and actually look forward to numeracy lessons. As far as I can see the main thing they have in common is that they all did the International Baccalaureate.

I’m busy working out what to include in a one day ICT workshop for trainee primary school teaching assistants. I’ve got an ICT suite booked from 10 till 3 and I’m wondering what people think the TAs really need to know. I’ve had a few thoughts of my own and some great input from Andy. Last night I found that Anthony was thinking about something similar. He’s planning some longer training for TAs and has narrowed it down to 4 topics:

Redbridge Primary ICT Consultant: TA Training
* Using relevant software to support a child with special needs
* Training other TAs to create banners for display
* Researching websites for teachers and TAs to use in their lesson
* Using the IWB to teach

I agree with these and have added them to my list. I also think he’s hit on a couple of really important points but maybe not spelled them out. Teach one TA in a school how to do something really useful on the computer and it tends to spread without the need for formal training. Teaching assistants tend to be a resourceful lot and if something is actually useful it spreads virally through the school.

Of course I was interested that he’d picked out making banner titles for classroom displays. This is something I’ve banged on about for ages. Hand cutting lettering for displays is a hugely wasteful use of teaching assistants’ time. Often schools don’t even have die cutters for the letters so that means using wooden templates, drawing them out and then cutting by hand. If TAs, and so by implication teachers, learn how easy it is to do banner titles, and how good they can look, maybe this can change.

Other areas I’ve thought about:

• File saving and sharing - an introduction. Basic, but many people, including teachers, have no concept of the difference between files and folders, don’t understand about saving versions, or even sensible naming of .docs
• Calibrating white boards. This is a simple but really helpful classroom skill!
• Supporting from the side - how not to do it for them!
• Very basic troubleshooting. Things like checking knowing how to check the in control panel of the laptop when the sound doesn’t work. It’s often just defaulted to ‘mute’.

I think the best way to take this forward might be to use a wiki page so I’ve set up a Teaching Assistants ICT Training page on usefulwiki.

If anyone wants to join in it is easy to edit. Just set yourself up a user name and away you go

So what do you think teaching assistants need to know about using and supporting with ICT? Either add your thoughts to the wiki or leave a comment here.

Friday was Work Your Proper Hours Day and the TUC issued this report to go with it.

Trades Union Congress

It looked at variety of professions, 3 guesses which one worked the most unpaid hours:

• Value of unpaid overtime per employee £12,009
• Value on unpaid overtime per profession £7,348(millions)
• Percentage doing unpaid overtime 52.4%
• Average hours of unpaid overtime 11.2

Yep - teachers
So even with the reforms in the workplace, the 24 (or is it 25?) tasks, the Well Being Programmes, and the rest, teachers are still working more longer hours than they are paid. This even takes into account the ‘holidays’ and ‘early finishing’ that people are often so envious of!

What About Teaching Assistants?

I couldn’t find any figures for teaching assistants but I suspect it is vastly more than even teachers! It’s easy to see how a culture has grown up in schools where the teachers are not expected to make a fuss if they work unpaid hours and so they in turn just expect the TAs to do the same. They often forget that TAs are not paid for any hours they don’t have in their contracts, so no paid lunchtime, no paid holidays, and a very low hourly rate.

Not that TAs do themselves any favours. I’ve known people whose hours were cut because of budget issues carry on working.

“because if I don’t there will be no one there to run X for the children”

(OK, I confess - I was that loony!)

Early on in my time as a TA someone told me that schools run on the goodwill of teachers, TAs and the other support staff. I suspect that’s very true. People chose to work in schools in part because they care about children and their education and the institution relies on that.

Now we are expecting education workers to use even more of their ’spare time’ learning about internet technologies and undertaking informal CPD. It’s only going to work if they can see it as a way of eventually reducing those 11+ extra hours a week, not just another burden.

How are we going to do this? Ideas on a postcard please or better yet you could leave a comment below