Ofsted's praise for TAs

Ofsted has given a loud cheer for the work of teaching assistants and other support staff in school.
Ofsted's report on the wider school workforce says support staff are having a growing impact on children's educational achievement and well-being because of the special qualities and skills they bring into schools.
Teaching assistants and other support staff are especially successful at engaging children who are disaffected, including children who bully or have been bullied, and motivating them to learn, say the school inspectors.
In the best schools, senior managers recognise the special knowledge and skills support staff bring to their work because of their wide range of backgrounds and experiences.
TAs are most effective at improving attitudes to learning in schools where policies for managing behaviour set high expectations of pupils and are implemented consistently by all school staff.
Support staff are also having a big impact in many schools because of their ability to build strong links with parents and the local community. Ofsted says in nearly all the schools they visited TAs were improving communication with parents and carers by “giving timely, detailed information about children's progress, attendance, behaviour and well-being.” They were also helping parents develop the skills to support their children's education.
In more than half the schools inspected, parents who didn't want to talk to teachers because they had negative experiences of school themselves, or lacked confidence, were happy to talk to teaching assistants who may have been parents at the school themselves, or may have come back to education
Parents whose first language was not English also were more willing to talk to a support staff member who could speak their first language.
The wider school workforce is having a greater impact than in its previous surveys, Ofsted said. Communication between teachers and teaching assistants was key to success because TAs have the biggest impact when they understand their role and know exactly what they need to do to help pupils make progress.
But schools needed to do more to manage and develop their support staff, including making more use of the Training and Development Agency for Schools' national occupational standards and career development framework.
The employment, training and development of the wider school workforce

"Get the dads involved"

The government wants schools to do more to support fathers.
Children's minister Beverley Hughes wants fathers to be more involved with their children's health and education, and for people working with children to think about how they can help them get involved.
The government points to evidence that children who grow up with strong father figures are less likely to get into crime, take drugs, have mental health problems or experience difficulties forming relationships.
Hughes called for a campaign to get the message across “that parental responsibilities should be shared equally among parents”.

More children to get free travel

All primary school children in Wales will be eligible for free bus travel to school from September if they live more than two miles away from the nearest suitable school. The threshold now is three miles, and this will remain for secondary school students.
Local authorities will also be obliged to help children access Welsh medium education under the new law passed by the Welsh Assembly.

Work keeps parents from school

Two out of three parents would like to get more involved in their children's school life but many cannot because of their work.
New research shows that only about half of parents feel very involved, but some are more likely to be involved than others. Parents of young children, Black parents, and parents of children with special educational needs are more likely than average to be involved.
The research confirms that parents' involvement in children's education from an early age has a big impact on children's achievement right into adulthood.
Family learning brings benefits to parents and children, including improvements in reading, writing and numeracy.and it gives children more confidence in helping their child at home.
The Impact of Parental Involvement on Children's Education DCSF 2008

New schools for old

More than 1500 primary schools have been given the go ahead to rebuild or refurbish their premises.
Building plans worth £3.5 billion have been approved by the government – the first stage in a programme to update half of all primary schools within 15 years. 700 schools have been rebuild or completely refurbished since 1997, the government claims.
Education secretary Ed Balls said “A decade ago many classroom facilities were in an appalling condition….Today’s announcement means we can build state of the art primary schools at the heart of our communities – so every child and family as access to year-round extended childcare, parenting support, after school activities and access to ICT, sports and arts facilities.
41 local authorities have had their Primary Capital Funding applications agreed for the next two years, and another 92 will be told how much money they will get next year. 15 have been told to resubmit their plans.

TAs teach Turkish lessons

Bilingual teaching assistants are teaching classes in their native language in London primary schools.
Schools in the north London borough of Enfield are being encouraged to find out what languages are spoken by all their teaching staff – not just the qualified teachers – when they choose which foreign language to teach.
The borough wants more schools to teach Turkish and Greek to children instead of choosing the usual western European languages of French, Spanish and German.
One Turkish born teaching assistant, Zuleyha Kahveci, is teaching two Turkish lessons a week for year five pupils at Churchfield Primary School in Enfield according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.
The school has a large number of Turkish children, and many teachers are also interested in learning Turkish so they communicate more easily with parents.
Enfield’s language advisor Bernardette Clinton said the council was hoping that teaching community languages would increase understanding in the local community.

"One child in ten is abused"

One child in ten in the UK is experiencing physical, sexual or emotional abuse or is neglected, say experts.
Research published in the Lancet medical journal says that most maltreated children are never referred to social services. People who have contact with children such as teachers and teaching assistants lack awareness of the signs of maltreatment, and the procedures for reporting any concerns to child protection agencies. Many professionals also have little confidence that telling social workers will help children or fear their lives will be made even worse if they are taken into care, say the researchers.
Using a range of different studies, the Lancet claims that every year between four and 16 per cent of children are physically abused, and one in ten is neglected or emotionally abused.
During children, up to one in ten girls and one in twenty boys experience penetrative sexual abuse. Up to three times as many are sexually abused in non-penetrative ways.
The researchers say that neglect is at least as damaging as physical or sexual abuse in the long term, but has received least attention.
Lancet editor Richard Horton said the findings showed that child maltreatment was very complex. Trying to blame individual professionals or think there was a simple solution was to “completely misrepresent the extent and depth of the problem”, he said.

Curriculum shake-up recommendations

Primary schools should have more flexibility for project work and other cross-curricular teaching says education expert Sir Jim Rose.
Sir Jim has recommended that the national curriculum should be based on six areas of learning, instead of the current range of individual curriculum subjects.
The aim is to give schools more flexibility for project-based cross-curricular learning, though he also says essential that subject-teaching must not disappear and can be encompassed within the six areas.
Sir Jim rules out changing the school start date from the September after the child’s fourth birthday. But parents could be allowed to send their child to school only part time to begin with.
Sir Jim was asked by the government to review the primary curriculum, but was told not to consider SATS in his report. He has commented that every school talked about testing, and it should be reviewed separately. Teachers’ leaders have said his proposals cannot work unless SATS are scrapped.
In this interim report, the review also suggests that the primary curriculum might be better divided into three two-year phases instead of the current two key stages.

The six areas of learning proposed by Sir Jim Rose
Understanding English, communication and languages
Mathematical understanding
Scientific and technological understanding
Human, social and environmental understanding
Understanding physical health and well-being
Understanding the arts and design