ABSTRACT
One of the main principles laid out in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice is that: High quality teaching that is differentiated and personalised will meet the individual needs of the majority of children and young people. The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff project looked at how teaching assistants (TAs) were deployed in schools and found that many TAs were more focused on helping pupils complete the tasks they had been given rather than helping them understand what they had been asked to learn. Consideration will need to be given to different support strategies and how they can be structured to meet the individual needs of pupils within the context of science lessons, particularly in light of the expectation that 'every teacher is a teacher of pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities'. In many secondary and middle schools, there has been a move to train TAs in specific areas of the curriculum.
