The classroom deployment of teaching assistants in England: a critical review of literature from 2010 to 2020

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the results of a critical literature review that focusses on the classroom deployment of teaching assistants (TAs) in England between 2010 and 2020, a period marked by an upward trend in the number of these adults in school workforces internationally. The study utilises the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al. [2014]. Changing practices, changing education. Springer Singapore) to reconceptualise this literature, using this framework to draw a distinction between an epistemological and an ontological view of practices. A process of systematic review was undertaken, with 20 peer-reviewed articles retained for critical scrutiny against this framework. Findings show how influential studies conducted over this period have developed a comprehensive view of these practices in England. Yet, within this view of TA deployment there are areas of complexity which deserve further attention from researchers. The remaining literature is used to highlight these areas through the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political architectures that serve to prefigure the ways in which these practices unfold. It is concluded that, whilst it is useful for research to establish models of practice that codify effective features of TA support, this should be supplemented by methodologically and theoretically diverse studies which can chart how these models unfold in relation to specific groups of people and the features encountered at local sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching assistants
• paraprofessional school personnel
• inclusive education
• literature reviews
• practice theory

Introduction

The use of teaching assistants (TAs) to provide additional support in schools has become, for a number of European countries, a prevalent response to the vision of “providing education for children … with special educational needs within the regular education system” (UNESCO, 1994, p. 9) set out in the Salamanca Statement, almost 20 years ago (Giangreco, 2021; Webster & De Boer, 2021a). Known internationally by a range of titles, these adults have undergone a rapid rise to prominence, with many countries experiencing a significant increase of these staff in their educational workforce (Webster et al., 2020). The English primary and secondary school system represents a broadly typical case of this international trend (Webster, 2022): in 2003, a national agreement between schools, unions and the then Labour government, sought to tackle workload pressures experienced by teachers; significantly, it granted TAs more “opportunities to take on extended roles in support of teaching and learning” (DfES, 2003, p. 4). This marked an acceleration towards the more directly pedagogical roles these adults occupy today (Webster et al., 2010). TAs now comprise 28% of English public sector school staff, a figure that has doubled since that recorded in the year 2000 (DfE, 2021). These developments have been accompanied by a corpus of academic literature that has sought to document and understand how TAs, and their presence in schools, can affect the processes of education.

The period selected for review, 2010–2020, represents a significant cross section of this broader timeline. The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) study published its findings at the beginning of this period; conducted in England, it remains the largest study of support staff anywhere in the world. Its findings served to problematise the role of the TA in the classroom, concluding that, “those pupils receiving most TA support made less progress than similar pupils who received no TA support” (Webster et al., 2010, p. 323). Furthermore, it identified a drift towards processes of deployment that inadvertently positioned the TA as the de facto educators of those pupils in receipt of this additional support, consequently separating them from their peers and the class teacher (Webster et al., 2010). Yet TAs themselves have lacked control over the conditions that have shaped these employment patterns (Basford et al., 2017; Webster, 2022). Indeed, the reactivity of successive governments in addressing these issues has meant that the practices of TA deployment in England have largely been decided locally, often through the activities of senior school leaders and teachers, and in response to the features of particular classrooms and school sites (Blatchford et al., 2012). This absence of strategic decision making can, in part, account for both the idiosyncratic picture of TA support across England and the difficulties in achieving widespread reform of deployment patterns that have unintentionally produced barriers to the educational inclusion of all pupils (Webster et al., 2020; Webster & De Boer, 2021a). The empirical literature examined over this period represents an academic field coming to terms with this emerging landscape.

Whilst there is a growing body of empirical research that supports the effectiveness of TAs in delivering targeted, research-informed interventions as a form of academic support for pupils (EEF, 2021; Sharples et al., 2015; Slavin et al., 2011; Webster et al., 2020), the role that TAs play in the classroom is a continuing source of debate and is the primary focus of this review. Recent international reviews have explored TA deployment through the impact, efficiency, and effectiveness of these adults in the classroom (Masdeu Navarro, 2015; Sharma & Salend, 2016). In contrast, my aim is to present a reconceptualization of TA deployment as a social practice, utilising a selection of research conducted in England to critically examine the implications of this for researchers. The review will argue that an influential portion of literature on TA deployment has developed a comprehensive view of these practices in England. Yet, within the view of TA deployment they set out, there are areas of complexity which deserve further attention. Through a critical examination of the remaining literature, I attempt to highlight some of these areas, exploring them through the lens of practice theory and drawing connections between them. Within this, I argue that, although this subset of literature has captured some of the complexity involved in these practices, there remains significant scope to expand the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches taken in research on TA deployment. Finally, it is contended that, while it is important for research to codify the broad features and trends of TA support, this should be supplemented with studies that can explore how these unfolding processes are mediated within particular contextual arrangements. The review will proceed in three parts: in section one, I will outline the theory of practice architectures, connecting this to the practices of TA deployment; section two details the systematic approach taken to selecting the literature examined in the review; sections three and four present the findings and conclusions of the review.

The theory of practice architectures

This review utilises Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al.'s (2014) theory of practice architectures and aligns itself with the central tenets of what have become known as theories of practice (Schatzki, 2016). These theories contend that practices (as opposed to, say, individuals or social structures) are the principle components of human coexistence (Schatzki, 2002). A practice can be defined as “a form of socially established cooperative activity” (Kemmis, Heikkinen, et al., 2014, p. 155), characterised by distinctive discourses, ideas and understandings (sayings), particular ways of acting (doings), and ways of relating with each other and the world (relatings) (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014). TA deployment is an example of a practice: it is sustained through specialist discourses (e.g. of care, of inclusion, of effectiveness), ways of acting (e.g. activities constituting pupil support), and ways of relating (e.g. pupil to TA, TA to teacher).

Furthermore, practices are situated within, and contextualised by, the specific ontologies, or architectures, of the sites at which they are located (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014; Schatzki, 2002). These architectures form “the interconnected historical, cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions that enable and constrain the workings (production, reproduction and transformation) of social life” (Edwards-Groves & Grootenboer, 2021, p. 266). This is to represent the relationship between practices and context as ontological: “[p]ractices, generally speaking, use, set up, give meaning to, and are directed toward and inseparable from arrangements and their components, whereas arrangements and their components induce, prefigure, channel, and are essential to practices” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 41). Put simply, practices develop in response to the architectures they unfold amidst; and these architectures adapt and are adapted as practices go on. How the practices of TA deployment happen, then, is enabled and constrained by the specific practice architectures found or brought into a site: the cultural-discursive (e.g. discourses of parsimonious resource use, of professionality), the material-economic (e.g. classroom set-ups, resources, pay structures), and the social-political (e.g. conditions of employment, codes of practice, professional frameworks); they are also interwoven with other practices in the wider educational complex (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014). Importantly, in order to change the course of a practice (such as those involved in TA deployment) there has to be a change in the architectures which sustain and enter into it (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014). In this sense, the theory of practice architectures contests procedural and atomistic perspectives, where the drive to generalise can obfuscate significant contextual features (see, for example, Thomas, 2021), and reasserts and re-examines “the wide variety of factors that shape the activities, processes, or formations they are about” (Schatzki, 2002, p. 12).

Within this framework, and particularly useful for the purposes of this paper, Kemmis (2022) draws a distinction between an epistemological and an ontological view of practice. An epistemological view is characterised by its emphasis on the knowledge that is required by individuals to take part in a practice. In the process of extrapolating and codifying this knowledge, it becomes externalised from our embodied selves and separated from the sites and historical conditions that give these practices their texture. On this view, change becomes a technical process, largely dependent on the efficacy and fidelity with which individuals can enact these externalised models of practice. As Kemmis (2022, p. 11) writes, this is to “see the social order as a vast administrative and economic system that needs to be controlled through law and policy to produce desired outcomes”. An overview of these perspectives can be found in Hood’s (1991) outline of the trends of New Public Management where emphasis is placed on the standardisation of performance through explicit quantitative measurement; priority is given to organisational output over procedures; and economy and efficiency are positioned as key indicators of effective management. His framework, and Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al.’s (2014) interpretation of these concepts, were used to further inform this critical review.

Contrastingly, an ontological perspective contends that practice is irreducible to these linear-rational logics, instead regarded as unfolding in unpredictable and unforeseen directions that are only partly governed by the actions of individuals. In this sense, action is guided by practical intelligibility – what it makes sense for someone to do at any given moment (Schatzki, 2002). This disputes a view of human action that is purely rational and deliberative, arguing that our sense of what to do next in a given situation is shaped by a wider ambit of factors: the types of discourses and cognitive understandings that sustain the practice and the ways in which they are enabled and constrained by particular contexts and people; the ways in which material arrangements reflect the practices performed, and how they shape and enter into the skills and capabilities of practitioners; and the feelings, emotions and values that are available within the practice, and how these are expanded or restricted by the political and social climates available (Kemmis, 2022). This is to take account of the historical, physical, and social conditions that prefigure (but do not determine) the extent to which certain pathways of activity are accessible as people go on in practice (Kemmis, Heikkinen, et al., 2014).

Methodology

The aim of this review was to complete a meta-synthesis of the selected literature. This approach proceeded by reinterpreting and analysing existing empirical studies using an alternative theoretical framework as a lens to illuminate new ways of thinking about the topic (Strom et al., 2018). It was guided by two research questions:

1. What descriptions and understandings of TA classroom support practices in England can be found in the literature?

2. How can the theory of practice architectures be used to produce new understandings of these practices to those found in the literature?

Search strategy and screening

An inherent barrier to the search for relevant literature on TAs is the variation in titles that exist between settings and contexts. Therefore, to develop a suitable range of search terms, existing literature and Google searches were used to identify common names for these personnel. These names were then used to create terms that were used to search four electronic databases: ERIC (Educational Resources Information Centre), Web of Science, EBSCOhost, and Scopus. The results were screened using each database’s search tools to retain articles which were both peer-reviewed and published between 2010 and 2020. A parallel process was conducted with articles that were already known to the researcher through a familiarity with the field. These articles were then imported to Endnote desktop, a reference management programme: using the functions built into this programme, duplicate records were removed. The remaining titles were then scanned for relevance to the study’s questions. This yielded a total of 240 articles which were retained for a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria to be applied.

Following this, the remaining articles were screened in an iterative process (Simmie et al., 2017): titles, abstracts and methodology sections were read and compared against a predeveloped set of inclusion and exclusion criteria, guided by the research questions. For the purposes of this review, the pool of articles was further limited to studies conducted in England between 2010 and 2020. At the conclusion of this process, twenty articles were retained for critical review. In contrast with a systematic review, the aim was to identify a pool of articles that would offer a diversity of perspectives for critical interrogation as opposed to an exhaustive overview of the field.

The process of critical review

Following Simmie et al. (2017), a guiding rubric (available from author on request) was developed to highlight the key tenets of the contrasting perspectives set out in the theoretical framework. The distance between these two views was used as a spectrum to critically assess the literature on TA deployment. Articles were read, re-read, and analysed in relation to this rubric, both individually and as a collection. This involved a process of noting down key insights for each study in relation to the perspectives set out in its literature review; its methodological and theoretical orientations; its findings and how these were presented; and the positions adopted by the author(s) in the discussion, recommendations and conclusion. This process adopted a critical perspective on these texts (Simmie et al., 2017), recognising that they constitute a special type of material artefact that describe and create particular networks; they embody programs of action, which are “the set of actions that it prescribes to or imposes on humans and other entities if they are to figure in a network with it” (Schatzki, 2002, p. 202).

Findings

Through the process of critical analysis, there emerged three key thematic threads: (1) 2010–2020 represents a significant period of flux for the field of TA deployment, markedly shaped by the publication of the government-funded Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) study in 2010. (2) Taken as a collection, the studies serve to illustrate how the sayings, doings and relatings of TA deployment practices are invariably shaped by, and indeed shape, the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political architectures present in a site; in the following sub-sections, studies are grouped and presented to illuminate TA deployment practices in relation to this theoretical perspective. (3) The majority of smaller-scale studies (12 out of 14) in the collection utilise research designs and methods which involve participants reporting and reconstructing their role in a practice (e.g. interviews, surveys); sole reliance on these methods, it is argued, may minimise the part that practical, embodied, and tacit knowledge may play in TA deployment practices, a point taken up in the discussion and conclusion of the paper.

The influence of the DISS study: TA deployment in flux

The studies in this section represent an influential strand of the literature on TA deployment. Collectively they have contributed to the development of the Wider Pedagogical Role (WPR) model which outlines a distinctive perspective on the current and future role of the TA, conceptualised through the interwoven domains of preparedness, deployment, and practice, and concerned with improving the impact of TAs on the educational outcomes of pupils (Webster et al., 2010). Pioneered by researchers at the Institute of Education, UCL, the development of this model can be traced across three large-scale projects – the DISS study (Rubie-Davies et al., 2010; Webster et al., 2010), the Making a Statement (MaST) study (Webster & Blatchford, 2013, 2015), and the Special Educational Needs in Secondary Education (SENSE) study (Blatchford & Webster, 2018; Webster & Blatchford, 2019). Their influence can be argued in several ways: SCOPUS data suggests they are amongst the most highly cited articles over this period with a combined citation value of 244 (versus 139 for the remaining literature combined, correct at the time of writing); the findings of the DISS study have been used to underpin guidance for all English schools in the effective use of TAs (Sharples et al., 2015); and, collectively, these perspectives feature prominently in subsequent studies undertaken during this time-span (e.g. in literature review, methodology, and discussion sections).

Rubie-Davies et al. (2010) and Webster et al. (2010) report on the DISS project: it remains the largest study into the deployment practices of TAs in England and involved the participation of pupils, senior leaders, teachers and support staff across a large number of primary, secondary and special schools. It focussed on securing an understanding of how support staff were deployed in everyday classrooms and the impact they have on “teachers, teaching and pupil learning, behaviour and academic progress” (Webster et al., 2010, p. 321); it utilised a longitudinal mixed methods approach that incorporated surveys, timelogs, case studies and combinations of structured, systematic and video observation. The findings revealed a negative association between the amount of TA support given to pupils and the academic progress they made, even after controlling for other relevant explanatory factors. The authors develop the WPR model to identify and explain the relationship between a multiplicity of factors identified in the study: a lack of training amongst teachers in how to work with TAs effectively; limited time in the school day for planning preparation and feedback between teachers and TAs; an inadvertent drift towards schools’ use of TAs to teach pupils with the most complex support needs, resulting in the effective separation of these pupils from the class teacher; and the contrasts between the interactions of teachers and TAs with pupils, with the latter group tending to focus on task completion and a “closing down” of pupil talk. Importantly, the study shows how the practices of TA deployment extend beyond the decisions of individual teachers and are inextricably interwoven with the architectures of the wider sites where schooling practices are played out.

Two papers by Webster and Blatchford (2013, 2015) outline the MaST project which explored the educational experiences of 48 primary school pupils (9 and 10-year-olds) with statements of special educational need (at the time, the highest level of classification for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities [SEND] in England) through a mixed method design. Findings from systematic observations supported and extended the data from the DISS study, showing that these pupils experienced separation from their teachers and peers both through their withdrawal from the classroom and the almost continual presence of a TA, a well-intended but problematic strategy of support (Webster & Blatchford, 2013). Case study data deepened these findings by highlighting the means by which within-classroom segregation can occur, the high degree of planning and teaching responsibility taken by TAs for these pupils’ curriculums, the use of TAs by teachers to verbally differentiate tasks reactively, and the gaps in teachers’ and TAs’ knowledge in how to meet the needs of pupils with statements (Webster & Blatchford, 2015).

Similarly, the SENSE study conducted by the same team (Blatchford & Webster, 2018; Webster & Blatchford, 2019) replicated the design of the MaST study in terms of methods whilst shifting the focus to 49 secondary school pupils (13–14-year-olds) with statements of special educational need. Systematic observation yielded similar results to the MaST study, albeit with the caveat that secondary pupils with statements experienced smaller class sizes than their primary counterparts; this was largely attributed to the prevalence of attainment grouping, a strategy criticised by the authors for its lack of a discernible evidence base (Blatchford & Webster, 2018, p. 699). Qualitative data from pupil case studies showed a tendency for support for pupils with statements to be defined in terms of the allocation of TA hours rather than its quality; this was linked to the further contention that the ways in which teachers and TAs articulated their understandings of support for these pupils was ambiguous and lacked theoretical or evidentiary grounding.

Through a multimodal approach, this collection of studies represents a high-quality spectrum of research on TA deployment that has developed an in-depth view of these practices in England. Yet, perhaps due to the scope and breadth of these studies, there remain areas of complexity within the WPR model that deserve further examination; for example, how TA deployment practices emerge in particular schools and particular classrooms, or why the patterns of deployment found in the DISS study do not occur in every case (i.e. outlier cases). To illustrate this argument further: the model rightly critiques the separation of pupils from the class teacher and outlines many of the factors that can lead to this; but investigation of these practices in particular instances may generate knowledge on the more fine-grained situational factors and processes that lead to these occurrences. The exploration of these nuances in relation to TA deployment might usefully be described as what Thomas (2022) refers to as “exemplary knowledge”; that is to say examples that are “taken to be a particular representation given in context and understood in that context … viewed and heard in the context of another’s experience, but used in the context of one’s own” (p. 79). Indeed, while the WPR model has identified significant areas for change in relation to TA deployment practices, it has also served to problematise them, challenging researchers to explore how these practices unfold in the contested realities of the schooling landscape. Using the remaining literature, the following three subsections aim to highlight aspects of these contestations, drawing together some of the intertwined cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political architectures that prefigure these practices in England. While studies have been grouped to illuminate these different aspects and architectures of TA deployment practices, this choice of presentation is only intended as an analytical construct: in reality, these features “appear in combination with one another across these dimensions … [t]hey are not parallel universes, but dimensions of a single universe” (Kemmis, 2022, p. 96), necessarily entangled and interwoven. Yet, it is through their disaggregation that it becomes possible to develop an overview of the role these factors play in the emergence and sustainment of TA deployment practices and to map further avenues of complexity for researchers to engage with.

The cultural-discursive architectures and “sayings” of TA deployment practices

The studies in this section (n = 4) are drawn together to illuminate how TA deployment practices are realised and achieved, at least partially, through discourse. Collectively, they show how roles within these practices are in dynamic negotiation, constructed, not just by those in formal positions of responsibility, but by all those who participate in these practices as part of their day-to-day lives. Further, they demonstrate how TA deployment practices are prefigured, in part, by the cultural-discursive architectures of the site, coalescing around themes of power and pupil voice, professional identity, and the positioning of the individual in relation to institutional discourses.

Bland and Sleightholme (2012) elicited the views of a class of 28 Year 5 and 6 pupils (10–11-year-olds) on what would make a “good” TA if their headteacher were to hire one tomorrow. Responses highlighted the affective elements that permeate pupil understandings of what it means to be a “good” TA. Their responses represent the concept of the TA as something more than a functional aspect of classroom support, emphasising a capacity for complexity and diversity in the way they approach and enact their work. Furthermore, the study shows how formal qualifications and skills are, at least for these pupils, secondary to the affective and emotional dimensions of the TA role in the classroom.

Similarly, an interview study conducted by Wren (2017) involved 11 pupils with statements of SEN and the TAs who regularly worked with them; it showed contrasting understandings of the TA role. Pupils tended to highlight the academic support they received from TAs, whilst TAs tended to focus on the behaviour management strategies that were required when working with pupils. The author draws attention to the ways in which pupils can form views of TA support independently of the intentions of this support, associating it with concepts such as play or friendship. The paper problematises the ways in which adult and pupil voice are utilised to inform TA deployment patterns, with the latter group holding significantly less influence over how these arrangements are constructed.

Through a small, participatory workshop of 12 teaching and learning assistants (TSLAs), teachers and managers, Watson et al. (2013), explore how TSLAs are positioned, by themselves and others, through a dynamic interaction of the social position they occupy, the acts that they engage in, and the local discursive contexts that emerge. They present a complex view of TSLAs that reflects the informal hierarchies and liminality experienced, captured succinctly by participants in the dual storylines of “pond life” and “knowing one’s place” (Watson et al., 2013, pp. 106–107). By examining the messy realities of being a TSLA, the study provides an account of how these individuals negotiate the contradictions between formal definitions of role and personal realities, simultaneously positioned in deficit to the professional status of the teacher yet operating in skilled pedagogical relationships with teachers and pupils. The authors reject monolithic and criterion-based notions of role and challenge the exclusionary binaries created by narratives of professionalism, drawing attention instead to the ways in which TSLAs construct professional identity through “relationships, rapport, support, empathy and a genuine concern for children” (Watson et al., 2013, p. 115).

An interview study by Lehane (2016) employs critical discourse analysis to examine the experiences of 8 secondary school TAs in relation to inclusion and power. The study demonstrates how TA practice is laden with nuanced ethical and moral contradictions as they navigate relationships with pupils and teachers: maintaining congenial relationships with teachers despite expressing frustration at the provision they provide for pupils with SEN; working with sensitivity to avoid the stigmatisation of pupils while being critically aware of their role in “a thinly veiled medical model” (Lehane, 2016, p. 16) of support; and the sense that they are a “go-between” (Lehane, 2016, p. 12), caught amidst the competing demands of teachers and pupils, with little time for preparation and the initiative for communication resting with them. Through the work of Erving Goffman, TA deployment is theorised in relation to shame, with TA discourses and actions mirroring the sense of stigmatisation felt by the pupils they work with (Lehane, 2016, p. 14); “the asylum” (Lehane, 2016, p. 14) is used as a metaphor for the tensions between the school's institutional goals and the personal relationships that occur there; and the concept of “cooling the mark out” (Lehane, 2016, p. 15) frames the deployment of these TAs as a tranquilising force to soften the discontent that pupils can exhibit in relation to the exclusionary practices they may encounter in schools.

The material-economic architectures and “doings” of TA deployment practices

The unfolding of practices in physical space and time are distinctively shaped by the material-economic arrangements they occur amidst (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014; Schatzki, 2002). The studies in this section (n = 4) speak to this idea, showing how material-economic architectures connect with broader questions of equitable and sustainable educational practices, including that of TA deployment. They explore issues linked to performance-orientated schooling, structures of TA pay and responsibilities, and the impact that austerity-driven policy can have. Yet, they also demonstrate how these broader concerns are grounded in local arrangements, for example, in the interplay between physical classroom set-ups and the processes of inclusive education.

Hammersley-Fletcher and Lowe (2011) combine an open and closed response questionnaire of TAs (n = 200) and semi-structured interviews with headteachers (n = 8) to explore how workforce remodelling has shaped the practices of teachers, TAs, and headteachers. The authors argue that remodelling was designed around the principles of performance, highlighting the tendency for TAs to take responsibility for whole class teaching and how this can be seen to undermine teaching as a complex and morally committed practice. They present the choices of headteachers in deploying TAs in this way as a dilemma between cost-effectiveness and TA remuneration for this increased responsibility. They question whether headteachers have enough time to contemplate the full implications of their decisions around TA deployment in such a performance orientated school system, expressing concern that the pressures of performance have inhibited a more collective view of education as a process of solidarity. The study shows how TA deployment is far from an exercise in technical proficiency, but a practice in which the decisions taken by policy makers, leaders and those in positions of formal responsibility are heavy with moral and ethical consequences.

Basford et al. (2017) ground their study in the experiences of management practices in primary school settings, drawing insights from teaching assistants (n = 55), senior leadership team members (n = 6), teachers (n = 5) and local authority representatives (n = 2) through focus groups, questionnaires, interviews and document analysis. Their findings, while generally supporting the insights gleaned from the DISS project (Rubie-Davies et al., 2010; Webster et al., 2010), illustrate teachers feeling a lack of capacity to meet the needs of pupils identified with SEN and shifting this responsibility to TAs; this is reinforced by a lack of training amongst teachers in managing TAs and schools’ positioning of TAs as specialists in this area. They also highlight the difficulty in isolating the contribution of TAs to pupil progress and the barrier this presents to establishing performance management structures. The study explores the liminality of the TA as neither managed nor controlled, underlining how a lack of voice in the conditions of their work, coupled with a lack of direct management, can contribute to feelings of “otherness”.

Bennett et al. (2017) explore the extent to which TAs (n = 227) and teachers (n = 202) provide autonomy-supportive teaching – “an interpersonal style that promotes volition, interest and a sense of initiative in others” (p. 658) – and the antecedents for such practice. Utilising previously validated psychological questionnaires, TA responses reflect a more controlling view of teaching in comparison to that of teachers. These findings are explained, partially, by the contrasting amounts of autonomy these two groups experience in their work; the architectures of the site prefigure available courses of action, enabling or constraining different groups in different ways. Importantly, they note that the specific “variables that affect autonomy support amongst TAs are as yet unknown” (Bennett et al., 2017, p. 661) suggesting that these factors are fundamentally different to that of teachers.

A multiple case study conducted by Slater and Gazeley (2019) across three secondary schools, utilises lesson observations and interviews with teachers (n = 6), TAs (n = 7) and pupils (n = 14) to represent TA deployment across six typologies of support. The study distances itself from notions of formal roles and responsibilities, instead examining the “structuring of the interactions and dynamics” (Slater & Gazeley, 2019, p. 6) that constitute support arrangements. By taking this approach, their study shows how the roles of TA and teacher exist in fluid arrangements that do not always follow the roles presupposed by state structures, illustrated by the example of a less experienced teacher utilising the skills of a TA who was a retired Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo). The study also captures how the physical arrangements of TA support (e.g. the positioning of furniture, pupils and adults) are fundamental to practice, with the authors challenging simplistic understandings that equate pupil withdrawal by TAs with inadequate provision without considering how these strategies can, in some cases, be beneficial and complementary. The study challenges “binary understandings of the relative contributions of TAs and teachers” (Slater & Gazeley, 2019, p. 15), instead reasserting the role that physical, social, moral and political contexts have in shaping these practices.

The social-political architectures and “relatings” of TA deployment practices

The practices of TA deployment are made up of a diverse array of relationships (e.g. pupil-teacher, pupil-TA, teacher-TA, TA-TA, etc.) and the studies in this section provide examples of the complexity these relations can hold. Moreover, they show how these connections are prefigured by social-political architectures, but also how individuals can work to affect change to these conditions. They explore themes of collaboration, equity, conflict, and liminality, as well as articulating some of the axiological and affective dimensions to TA deployment practices.

An ethnographic study of three teacher-TA teams across two secondary schools by Devecchi and Rouse (2010) critiques the managerialist perspectives presented in the extant literature on teacher-TA collaboration; they highlight the importance of factors that lie outside formal roles and responsibilities, such as trust, respect, competence and experience. They observe that the teams often operated in horizontal arrangements of responsibility, sharing, not only their technical expertise with each other, but their “affective knowledge to facilitate and aid the inclusion of children with learning difficulties” (Devecchi & Rouse, 2010, p. 98). Their account of how collaboration between teachers and TAs facilitates inclusive practice incorporates three entwined domains: the extent to which resources are shared and available; the establishment of practices that develop and nurture space for collectively agreed action; and practices that reflect a mutual recognition of “individual free will, autonomy and determination” (Devecchi & Rouse, 2010, p. 98). Their study highlights how collaborative teacher-TA relationships can create the structures of the state differently through collective action, and how practices of educational inclusion are partly sustained through the affective and moral dimensions to these relationships.

A study conducted by Emira (2011) explores the views of 58 TAs and HLTAs on the concepts of leadership and management through a framework of distributed leadership. Through survey and interviews, participants identified leadership as a collaborative, team-working process, involving vision and the fostering of an encouraging climate. Management, on the other hand, was regarded as the organisation of adults, goalsetting, and managing pupil behaviour, though the results show high agreement with most of the statements provided by the researcher on management. The study reveals a moral dimension to the conceptions of leadership held by TAs and HLTAs in the study and, perhaps more crucially, explores how different forms of leadership (e.g. distributed, informal) can reimagine state-imposed hierarchies, to create “(more) democratic workplaces” (Emira, 2011, p. 171) where TAs may feel empowered and valued.

Mackenzie (2011) uses focus groups and life history interviews with a view to representing the voices of 13 TAs and how they perceive the work they undertake. The findings of the study reflect the tensions that can occur in teacher-TA relationships, illustrating how TAs can hold critical perspectives on the work they do and the moral purposes which shape their practice. In contrast to the collaboration between teachers and TAs found by Devecchi and Rouse (2010), the TAs in this study discuss an acute awareness of the limiting and reductive nature of the hierarchical structures that can operate in schools and in relationships with teachers; yet they remain critically aware of the importance of communication and collaboration to the achievement of inclusion. The study captures some of the embodied aspects of TA practice, highlighting its often physically and emotionally demanding nature. Interestingly, some cases reveal TAs to be critically aware of the ways in which teacher decisions on their deployment can detract from democratic classroom experiences for pupils. The article shifts the focus away from pupil and institutional outcomes and onto the tensions that can occur when policies and models are implemented in practice, demonstrating how these perspectives are vital in understanding how TA deployment structures can operate and be sustained.

A case study conducted by Roffey-Barentsen and Watt (2014) sought to represent the voices of eleven supporting adults, generating data through two focus groups. Their findings show these adults to possess a diverse range of professional experience that was often underutilised by schools; these feelings of liminality were also reflected in the school’s under-valuing or overlooking of the contributions of TAs to pupil review meetings and through tense relationships with teachers. The situation described by participants is reminiscent of larger studies in this area: a lack of clarity in their role; an uneasiness with an increased responsibility for whole class teaching; a lack of time to share planning; and being required to operate reactively in response to incidents of pupil behaviour. Yet, the study also demonstrates how the language of roles and formal responsibilities is ill-equipped to capture the practical, moral, and affective elements inherent to the experiences of these TAs; this ongoing misrecognition of their work by colleagues, senior leaders, and successive governments has fostered feelings of underappreciation amongst these members of school staff.

Cockroft and Atkinson (2015) employ a single case study design to explore connections between the characteristics, conditions of employment, preparedness, deployment and practice of 8 primary learning support assistants (LSAs), mobilising Webster et al.’s (2011) aforementioned WPR model as a framework. They elicit the voice of LSAs on the “facilitators and barriers to effective practice” (Cockroft & Atkinson, 2015, p. 92), which hint at the embodied nature of TA deployment practices: barriers to training that involve the decisions of leaders and the budget constraints of the system; the varied relationships they develop with teachers and how these affect information sharing; and the moral dimension to their practice, such as the desire to “do what needs to be done for each child” (Cockroft & Atkinson, 2015, p. 98). Significantly, they stress the tendency of these TAs to view their work through the positive relationships they had built with pupils as opposed to standardised measures of academic progress, positioning them, it could be argued, at odds with more instrumentalised educational discourses.

Using interviews, Bowles et al. (2018) explore the perspectives of 11 primary TAs on their inclusive pedagogical strategies. Utilising a scaffolding model originally proposed by Radford et al. (2015), they present their analysis in relation to three roles – support, repair, and heuristic. In relation to the support role, TAs reported providing emotional, curricular, and relational support, drawing on strategies such as praise, repetition, and group management. In terms of the repair role, TAs discussed the use of open questioning, withholding correction, modelling, and aligning interactions with the perceived level of the child. There was little evidence to show TAs providing heuristic support, though this is attributed to the “complexity of heuristics” (Bowles et al., 2018, p. 508) and the work that would be required to enable this aspect of practice to emerge – such as training and specific modelling of each support strategy. Interestingly, these findings reflect how practices of support can shape the dispositions of TAs and how their work becomes sensitive to particular pupils – for example, adapting to pupils’ moods, remaining calm, or knowing when to offer encouragement. This, in turn, draws attention to the relational literacy that TAs require to conduct their work and points to further exploration of how these practices may be further mediated at particular classroom and school sites.

Discussion and conclusion

This critical review has developed the argument that research on TA deployment in England between 2010 and 2020 has been shaped significantly by the perspectives first outlined in the findings of the DISS study, most notably the WPR model (Blatchford et al., 2012). This model offers critical insight into how patterns of TA deployment have emerged in England (and arguably in other countries where TA numbers have risen), revealing the complexity of relations that sustain such practices (Rubie-Davies et al., 2010; Webster et al., 2010). The aim of this paper has been to further elucidate these areas of complexity and to show how TA deployment practices emerge in relation to sites, unfolding across semantic, material-temporal, and social spaces (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014). Furthermore, it has sought to provide a contribution to the WPR model by highlighting some of the “categories of perception and appreciation … that structure [an agent’s] action from inside” – that is to say a person’s lived experience of practice (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 11). This is to reassert Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al.'s (2014) concerns on viewing practice epistemologically: that the knowledge required to engage in practices cannot be simply extrapolated, codified, and transferred to those working in and across similar roles; it is to see educational practice as a process of “learning to practise in the world, rather than just in terms of acquiring knowledge” (p. 99). Indeed, the relevance of these perspectives is reflected in how researchers have affected change in TA deployment practices in England: the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) programme, for example, was purposively created to address the findings of the DISS study – it has worked directly with schools to understand how the forms of knowledge captured in the WPR model can be adapted to local landscapes, building capacity for change from the ground up (Brackenbury et al., 2022). This view of change is further underlined through this review’s reconceptualization of TA deployment as a social practice: TA deployment incorporates more than the technical knowledge of individuals for its successful accomplishment; it is, in fact, a historically situated activity that requires a range of embodied and shared knowledge in its enactment at particular sites (Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014).

Taken collectively, the studies here-reviewed provide a provisional map of the contradictions, complexities, tensions and moral dilemmas that serve to prefigure the ways in which these practices unfold; they accentuate some of the site-specific practice architectures that serve to enable and constrain them. Crucially, they show TA deployment to mirror at least some of the critical-reflexive dimensions of teaching, offering researchers further points of departure from which to engage with and conceptualise TA deployment practices in schools. In this respect, the themes and ideas that run through this collection of studies (e.g. power, liminality, voice) serve to connect TA deployment practices to a broader social landscape. From a methodological standpoint, the review captures a tendency amongst smaller studies in the collection (12 out of 14) to utilise research designs that rely on participant reports of the practices of which they are a part (e.g. interviews, questionnaires). Whilst this is not problematic in and of itself, from the theoretical perspective offered here, the absence of studies which seek to connect TA deployment practices with their temporal–spatial rhythms may contribute to an inadvertent overlooking of the role other forms of knowledge may play in their achievement (e.g. embodied, tacit) (Nicolini, 2013). Certainly, Devecchi and Rouse’s (2010) ethnography of teacher-TA teams and Slater and Gazeley’s (2019) combination of participant interview with lesson observation illustrate how such approaches and methods can be used to explore these more immediate elements of practices and generate insights that may not have been gleaned from interview or survey alone.

This speaks to a broader matter: in a recent special issue of the European Journal of Special Needs Education, Webster and De Boer (2021b) lament the lack of ambition in the methodological approaches utilised by researchers in the field of TA deployment, critiquing the lack of “scale and scope … influence and impact” (Webster & De Boer, 2021b, p. 298) that some studies in this field exhibit. In addition, this review has shown that, while these are important concerns, there is also a need to broaden the range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that are utilised to conceptualise and understand TA deployment practices. The work that has been done to understand how TA classroom deployment can adversely impact groups of pupils has been critical in recalibrating how these practices are understood by practitioners and researchers alike (BERA, 2013). Yet, there is still scope for a more expansive research agenda that mobilises a diversity of viewpoints and methodologies to understand TA deployment in different and novel ways. It is through this diversity that existing models of TA deployment can be expanded to incorporate alternative ways of conceptualising these practices and the architectures that shape (but do not determine) the conditions of possibility for their achievement. To this end, I have offered an interpretation of TA deployment practices that positions the individual in composition with a broader educational landscape, where practice is collectively realised and prefigured through individual and organisational histories, relations of power, material arrangements, embodied knowing, discourse, and emotion; it recognises how universalistic models can, at times, diverge from the lived realities of practice and their inexorable connection to situatedness and locality (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Kemmis, Wilkinson, et al., 2014). Indeed, if debates on TA deployment are to challenge, disrupt, and extend existing patterns of understanding, then further exploration of TA deployment through a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches will be vital in further illuminating the complexity that the accomplishment of these practices entails.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).