Issue 30, Pages 16-17: Supporting your TA

The language of speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) or communication and interaction needs (both forms of label are in common use) is complex. These descriptors cover a wide range of difficulties and include expressive and receptive language needs and diagnoses. For many people, particularly those with little experience in this area, expressive language difficulties can be easier to identify and respond to as the child will struggle in some way to express their needs, ideas and interests. Identifying receptive language difficulties can be more challenging. There is often an assumption that if someone appears to understand that they do, especially when they appear to have good expressive language. However, this is not always true.

For teachers to support their TAs who work with children with SLCN, the first step must be to be clear about the child’s profile and how they can be supported. Too often, support staff are left to work this out for themselves. This is often because the teachers themselves are unclear. Teachers and TAs need to work together, alongside speech and language therapists and other professionals where they are involved, to develop a clear understanding of each child’s strengths and needs. This includes going beyond any diagnostic label. Two children with the same diagnoses may have very different profiles and require different responses to meet them.

TAs working to support children with SLCN tend to work either through focused SALT sessions or in-class support. Both have pros and cons. However, the key to ensure any intervention is successful is effective communication and understanding of the children and their needs.

“…TAs need to understand what they are teaching and be given time to prepare for the interventions and resources to be effective.”

The best support within the classroom is connected with and embedded in classroom practice, so children are given opportunities to use and develop their skills in real contexts. This could be phonics teaching to support speech work, literacy lessons for sequencing and sentence structure and focused work to develop vocabulary across the curriculum. This can be further supported by pre-learning, where the TA or teacher introduces key vocabulary and the visuals to support recall and understanding. This way the child is familiar and confident with the language and context of what they are going to learn before the lesson.

For any of this, including the use of visuals, to be effective, TAs need to know and understand what is going to be taught and how. This means the sharing of planning is essential. The ideal is that TAs would be involved and part of the planning process, but in reality, this is rarely possible.

Nevertheless, the basics of planning can be shared through three key questions:

What is the learning intention?

This needs to be focused and detailed. Not just maths or addition, but identifying the key methods, approaches or process to be used.

What is the key vocabulary?

What is the outcome?

This means the outcome for the child or children that the TA is working with, which may be different from the outcome for others.

I believe, that as far as possible, SEND support and interventions should take place in the classroom so that they are linked to what is being delivered as part of the wider curriculum. This avoids exclusion and the risk that the education of our most vulnerable children is outsourced to TAs as they attend more and more interventions and spend less time in the classroom. At this point there is a risk of interventions becoming ‘outerventions’.

However, there are some speech and language interventions that may need to happen outside the classroom as the pupil will need quiet for focus, to be able to hear sounds or support their self-esteem. But it is important that this work connects to what is being taught in class, so that children are given the opportunity to practice the skills and vocabulary they are learning and integrate them into their classwork.

Either way, TAs need to understand what they are teaching and be given time to prepare for the interventions and resources to be effective. Their time and space to deliver these interventions need to be respected. It is too easy for staff to be redeployed to cover absences or asked to deliver interventions in inappropriate spaces e.g., corridors. We should prioritise the time and space for interventions to demonstrate their value to the staff asked to lead them and the children receiving them.

Further, we need to ensure staff are able to attend the training and modelling sessions offered by other professionals. Equally, the support needs to be connected to the wider curriculum, so that it directly supports children’s access to learning. This requires the effective sharing of planning between teachers and their support staff