Nursery World - Assistants are now teaching (1)

Classroom assistants in England and Wales are increasingly taking on a teaching role, yet many earn less than a third of a teacher's salary, according to new research.

A study led by Dr Alan Marr of the Open University for the Economic and Social Research Council and due to be published shortly, has found that a fifth of teachers say classroom assistants regularly work with whole classes on their own, while 76 per cent reported classroom assistant involvement in the assessment of children's work.

The draft research report on the ESRC/OU Primary Classroom Assistants Project argues that the boundary between the work of teachers and classroom assistants is 'increasingly blurred'. It says the Government's guidance on classroom assistant activity in literacy and numeracy has accelerated the move from classroom assistants having an unacknowledged, indirect role in the teaching process, to having a direct role. It also says their pay is low, often less than 5 an hour, while their contracts are insecure, and calls for an immediate debate about their terms and conditions.

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