Teaching assistants, librarians and catering workers are on the frontline of England’s school behaviour crisis, facing daily abuse for low pay and long hours, according to a union representing school support staff.
A survey of more than 7,000 Unison members working in schools found that one in three said they were verbally abused every day, while many said they had recently witnessed violence including kicking, pushing and throwing objects.
Mike Short, Unison’s head of education, said the abuse was “mostly from pupils but occasionally from parents and carers”, with teaching assistants often having to work with the most challenging children in classrooms.
“These aren’t easy situations to resolve but the bottom line for us is that no one should go to work to face abuse or violence, and this is just a daily reality,” Short said.
“We’re seeing schools having to make do with less and less money, which means staffing levels that aren’t adequate to deal with these incidents when they come up. Support staff are having to pick up the slack and they are suffering as a result.”
Support staff make up about half of the school workforce, with teaching assistants (TAs) making up the majority of non-teaching staff.
The survey also found that the median pay for support staff was £1,200 to £1,400 a month, with most only paid during term time. Cost of living worries were high, with 78% saying they struggled to pay their bills.
Short said support staff’s workloads had increased since the pandemic, with two-thirds saying they were now having to work more unpaid hours each week.
“The pandemic changed the nature of the teaching assistant role in particular. A lot of TAs took on more duties informally during lockdown and that has persisted,” he said.
“In our survey, TAs described their job as more intense than before Covid – they are doing more around supporting pupils’ pastoral and wellbeing needs and delivering interventions to those who have fallen behind, and increasingly supporting parents and carers.
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“And they are backfilling for specialised staff: for example, a school might have had a speech and language therapist; if that job is cut for financial reasons, the teaching assistant ends up covering it. A lot of other roles have increased in volume and intensity, partly as a result of the pandemic.”
The government in England has promised to reintroduce a school support staff negotiating body, which Short hopes will lead to improvements in their pay, training and career frameworks. But the latest funding allocations leave schools at risk of needing to make further cuts after accounting for inflation and pay rises.
Julia Harnden, a funding specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “It is difficult to see how schools will be able to afford teacher and support staff pay awards at anything like the level required to address historic pay erosion and a severe and deepening staffing crisis.”
