A blog by a senior economist has thrown a spotlight on the differences between the provision of staffing in special schools and other school types.
On 25 February, on the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) website, Michael Scott made the point that, given schools for SEND and SEMH students rely substantially more on teaching assistants, they are more likely to be affected by the acute shortage that currently exists in England.
Two years ago, an NFER survey found that ‘63 per cent of senior leaders from special schools reported finding the recruitment of teaching assistants “very difficult”, compared to 51 per cent and 55 per cent in primary and secondary schools, respectively.
‘Special schools also reported substantially less success in filling all their teaching assistant posts within two months, presumably in part due to the sheer number of posts they need to fill. Respondents also highlighted the challenge of recruiting teaching assistants with skills to meet the specific needs of pupils with special educational needs.’
Low salary levels were identified as a significant contributory reason for the difficulty in recruiting and retaining teaching assistants, with the average full-time teaching assistant earning around £20,600 – £5,000 less than those with a similar level of skills and qualifications who work in the broader Caring and Leisure services.
Scott’s recommendations were:
- ‘DfE starts measuring teaching assistant vacancy rates. Give the criticality of teaching assistants to special schools, not doing so makes it difficult to fully assess the workforce challenge facing special schools.
- Special schools should always be fully funded to increase support staff pay. Funding allocations that only fund pay increases for teachers (and not support staff) will particularly disadvantage special schools and AP settings, who spend a higher proportion of their budgets on support staff.
- DfE should separate out special schools and alternative provision in school workforce statistics. The existing statistics conflate these settings in a way that masks differences between them.
- Work is done to understand why around 10 per cent of teachers in special schools do not have QTS, compared to the national average of three per cent, and remedies are implemented where this is driven by shortages in teachers with QTS.
Among those responding to the blog was Rob Williams, senior policy adviser at school leaders’ union NAHT, who said:
‘Support staff play a vital and rewarding role in helping children in special schools – but these findings echo what we hear from school leaders in these settings about the difficulties they face in affording, recruiting and keeping hold of teaching assistants.
‘The unpalatable truth is that in some areas, teaching assistants can earn more working in a café or supermarket, and we need the government to do more to improve their pay
‘Access to specialist staff, such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists, is also an issue amid workforce shortages, and neither are special schools immune to the recruitment and retention crisis facing teaching, where action to boost pay, ease workload, and to go further in fundamentally reforming school inspection, is desperately needed.
‘Funding is a big issue, however, and last year 84% of school leaders we surveyed said they would be forced to reduce the number of teaching assistants or hours worked by teaching assistants in the following three years due to budgetary pressures. It’s therefore vital that pay rises are properly funded by the government so that already pressured school budgets do not have to reduce provision elsewhere to pay for them.’
Read Michael Scott’s blog here.
