ABSTRACT
It is easy to forget, when you refer to the staff of a school, that you are talking not only about the teaching staff, but also about those who are not teachers, who make up something like a third of the total staff. School secretaries, technicians and caretakers have served in schools for many years and have established roles and patterns of work. The creation of other posts has been much more recent. The expansion in the area of non-teaching staff seems to have been spurred by a number of different factors. Some of the new posts were specifically designed to service new needs; others have evolved or developed from existing posts as a post holder had a good idea which led to the expansion of his or her role. The main catalyst for growth was perhaps the Education Reform Act of 1988 and the introduction of LMS, because the legislation provided new needs and created the flexibility to attend to them. Although most of the resulting expansion has been within the well-established boundaries determined by LEA rules and procedures, the new powers and available resources meant that an opportunity could be seized and acted upon, sometimes as a result of very careful analysis of needs, at others as the result of opportunistic thinking by a hard-pressed headteacher, and as a result there has been considerable innovation in the kind of posts created.
