Think of a business and its core activity. As consumers or clients, our thoughts around a respective business rarely go beyond said activity and the staff who operate directly within the roles linked to it. However, what would a business be without the staff who don’t operate at the forefront of its main activity yet play fundamental roles in the overall business? Imagine a retailer without the cleaners to maintain the cleanliness and tidiness of a store. Or without the admin staff to process orders, payments and payroll and the IT staff to maintain the EPOS till systems from which transactions can be made. Or without the stockroom staff to replenish the store’s inventory so that they actually have something to sell. Every role within a business is a cog in a machine. And if a cog is missing, the machine simply won’t work as effectively or might even come to a standstill.
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The problem sadly starts with the ethos of schools and consequently some teachers. Inadvertently or otherwise, schools often feed teachers with the notion that support staff play a lessor role than them and it’s reflected in the way they’re treated. It’s to the extent that many support staff have assumed that principle themselves and the utterances “I’m just a TA…”, “I just work in the office…” or similar can often be heard around schools. This hardly does anything positive for morale when half of a workforce feel they’re inferior to the other half or at least made to feel that way. Schools have a lot to answer for if this is seemingly the ethos that many possess and project when it comes to support staff. Though for some teachers, the seeds for a sometimes haughty attitude toward support staff are sown even earlier during teacher training.
Particularly on graduate employment-based training courses such as School Direct and Teach First, but also those undertaking traditional PGCE courses, trainee teachers are lauded for their attainment of a place given their competitive nature and rigorous application process. Subsequently, they’re praised for their successful completion of what is an arduous programme of study and employment as a trainee teacher. And those who heap that praise upon them would be right to do so as teacher training and the NQT year are certainly gruelling.
You’re told that you are the boss of your classroom and again the tutors and mentors are right. Your classroom is your domain and you need to oversee all that goes on within it as you’ll be accountable for all that occurs. Though many trainee teachers are relatively young and enter the profession within a few years of undergraduate study. They have little experience of a professional workplace let alone managing staff. As a result, some are unable to effectively manage additional adults in the classroom due to a literal and crass interpretation of the message ‘you’re the boss’ that they’ve heard throughout their training. Indeed, some teachers actually maintain that attitude throughout their teaching careers.
That inexperience doesn’t lend itself to working with non-classroom based support staff either. Your training and observations of other schools has suggested they’re also less important. And when you get to your first school, the school ethos often supports that. It’s the beginning of an unhealthy yet perpetual relationship between teachers and support staff. Furthermore, it illustrates how and why teaching can be a profession characterised by arrogance for some practitioners who wrongly deem themselves as superior to their colleagues on the basis of length of service (which doesn’t always equate to ability) and their respective position.
It has to be said that this isn’t the case for all teachers and it would be unfair to suggest so. Nevertheless, the fact is it does exist. I’ve seen TAs spoken down to or as if they were one of the children rather than as an adult. This is despite the fact that many classroom based support staff bring with them a wealth of untapped and often ignored experience from previous careers, CPD, the local community or just life in general.
Admittedly, some TAs can undermine teachers, particularly if they’re older than the teacher they’re working with and have been at a school for a number of years. However, that’s where establishing more assertiveness in your professional relationship comes into play.
I liken the ideal relationship between teachers and additional adults in the classroom to be almost akin to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in that the Prime Minister is first amongst equals just as is the case with the teacher. The buck stops with you as the teacher and the individual with whom overall accountability in the classroom lies with. The breadth of your role, workload and accompanying stress is wider too but you’re still a team with the additional adult(s) and your working relationship should reflect this.
Support staff in the classroom are often able to establish a relationship with students that many teachers are unable to achieve. As teaching has become an overwhelmingly middle class profession, many teachers are in schools within communities that do not reflect their own socio-economic status. Hence they’re often unable to empathise with their students’ backgrounds. In schools subject to socio-economic pressures such as those within inner city and coastal communities, and those where once flourishing local economies such as mining have since been decimated, the social challenges facing students and their families are often alien to teachers. But classroom based support staff, who often have more roots in a community than the teachers, can. Thus, they can often be the difference in connecting with students.
That connection might be in effectively supporting behaviour management with a culturally nuanced approach that gets the results a teacher sometimes can’t. Alternatively, it can be showing the necessary empathy to students in cultivating an appropriate climate for learning; one where they don’t feel subject to the ignorance of a teacher who cannot appreciate the challenges facing their family and community. In this capacity, support staff often provide a cultural and social link between schools and the communities they lie within; something many teachers and senior leadership are unable to do. Although, particularly with new academies that have foisted themselves on communities, this is overlooked by many schools.
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The relationship between teachers and support staff can resemble that of Ross’ museum in Friends where Joey realises that it’s convention for the scientists and the tour guides to sit separately for lunch. Nonetheless, it’s little wonder that many support staff feel there’s a divide between them and teachers. Relevant information is regularly disseminated to support staff through the grapevine or on a very ad hoc basis. Effective communication between them and the rest of the school can leave much to be desired and that hardly fosters a sense of inclusion within the school community.
Many teachers perceive support staff to be at their whim rather than playing integral roles within the school. They often fail to appreciate that the site team aren’t waiting around idly for the call to fix furniture in their classroom or that the IT staff have a long list of jobs and coming to fix their interactive whiteboard probably isn't the only task for the day. It could be argued that teachers often have a fairly insular perspective in this regard that theirs is not the only job of importance within a school.
In the UK, Graduate Teaching Assistants have started to increase their presence in the classroom (they’ve already been a feature of North American schools). This is presumably with a view to making the TA role more ‘professional’ which on one hand isn’t a bad thing if it helps to gain greater recognition for the post. Although, some schools are seeing it as a prerequisite for teacher training. Again, that isn’t necessarily a bad idea in providing trainee teachers with first-hand experience of the classroom before they embark on their training. Conversely, there is the risk that it will attract candidates that ultimately want to become teachers rather than be TAs and therefore lack the necessary attributes and attitudes that make so many TAs great at their jobs.
Schools are essentially communities but they’re often divided within their staff which can only be to detriment of the workplace ethos. Schools and teachers need to address this as they are primarily to blame in creating the two-tier system within schools that is not only unnecessary but disrespectful to fellow professionals. Schools need to give support staff the recognition they deserve for the integral role they play within a school, often in roles that teachers don’t possess the skillset or experience for, and more respect in the process.
