ABSTRACT
This book was written to address the startling results from the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project: pupils who received the most support from TAs made signifi cantly less progress than similar pupils who received less support (Blatchford, Russell and Webster, 2012). The DISS project showed that this troubling and surprising fi nding is explainable in terms of the ways TAs are actually deployed in schools. The extensive observation and other forms of data collection in the DISS project showed that at present TAs often have a frontline pedagogical role, but an ineffective one. Problems emerge particularly when TAs are given an ill-defi ned remedial role. We concluded that the impact and practice of TAs need to be seen in terms of decisions made about their deployment, preparedness and their conditions of employment – things that are outside their control. We called for a fundamental reassessment of the way TAs are used in schools.
