Teaching reforms and the impact of paid adult support on participation and learning in mainstream schools

In the first of our three articles focusing on the role of support staff, Andrew Howes considers some of the implications for the deployment of support staff of Raising Standards and Tackling Workload: a National Agreement. He considers that the wider impact of this proposed deployment has been insufficiently explored in the Agreement. Here he reviews the literature to establish what is known about the impact of support staff in mainstream schools and what the possible outcomes might be if professional roles are reworked in the ways proposed.