Teachers should not oppose classroom assistants

The union is dragging its feet, not for the stated reasons but because it won't let go of arguments it has lost

There can be no doubt that pay rises and attractive remuneration packages during training have made teaching much more attractive to graduates. More people are going into the profession, talented, committed people who want to make a mark in their new career. But problems of retention remain, with punishing workloads among the main complaints – a third of the teachers who responded to a recent survey said they did not want to stay in the profession.

That's why it is crucial that the new deal offered by the Department for Education and Skills, which promises to ease significantly the hours teachers put in each week, must be made to work. But how can it, when the National Union of Teachers (NUT), the biggest teaching union, will not sign up?

The Government and five teaching unions, including those that represent classroom assistants, have signed up to a £1bn plan that aims to reduce the number of hours worked by teachers by giving increased responsibility to classroom assistants. However, the NUT, which has always been hostile towards the inroads of classroom assistants into state education, continues stubbornly to reject such a compromise.

Which is a pity. There are many good, sound and helpful ideas in the document. Time will be freed up for teachers to prepare and mark work during teaching hours by removing 24 administrative tasks from teachers' contracts and placing responsibility for them in the hands of assistants. These tasks include such duties as photocopying, collecting pupils' lunch money, ordering supplies, invigilating exams and stocktaking.

But in themselves they are not enough to deliver to teachers the extra time they demand and need. Teachers are also being offered a limit to the time they spend covering for classes whose teachers are absent. Under the deal, it is suggested, classroom assistants can receive extra training that will enable them to take over such classes as drama, art, sport, music and, possibly, foreign language classes.

Classroom assistants have broadly welcomed the suggested changes, because they give a definition and a structured career pattern that they have hitherto found lacking. None of this seems unreasonable, and nor does it seem detrimental to educational standards. Surely such innovations can be made to work.

Not, says the NUT, when there is a clause in the deal that implies that classes of 60 pupils can be taught by one teacher, backed up by one assistant. For all of those who continue to believe that the great weakness of state education remains classes that are too big, and that do not allow enough time for one-to-one attention between teacher and pupil, this is indeed a retrograde step.

It seems pretty obvious that, whatever the theory behind this idea, the schools that are most likely to find themselves having to resort to such measures are the schools that struggle most to attract staff. And what, above all, prevents schools from attracting staff? That other great bugbear, second only to workload in turning off teachers – disruptive pupil behaviour.

Can the Government really believe that allowing one teacher and one assistant to face a single class of 60 tricky pupils is not going to create difficulties? The Department for Education dismisses the fears of the NUT, saying that classes of 60 would be likely only during such lessons as physical education or drama.

How wrong-headed this is, particularly in the former case. Sport in schools has already been sidelined far too much. How can talent possibly be nurtured with such adult-to-child ratios considered acceptable? Why does the Government not simply dump this clause, and keep the NUT on board?

Partly, I think, just because the Government is fed up with negotiating with the union, which tends to look increasingly militant and stroppy as teaching conditions improve. The NUT has for a long time been overly hostile to the idea of classroom assistants. There is a real sense here that the union is dragging its feet not for the stated reasons but because it will not let go of arguments it has already lost.

But, at the same time, there is a sense in which the Government, too, is behaving in an equally recalcitrant fashion. Teachers are now paid more, and they want to work less – at present there is no limit at all on the hours teachers are expected to put in.

The teacher recruitment agency is working hard at finding new recruits, and a pledge under this deal promises that 10,000 more teachers will be found by the year 2006. Yesterday, workers in the City were being targeted, with literature being handed out at Tube stations suggesting that teaching might be a much more rewarding career than office work.

But the people the Government is really interested in bringing into education are assistants. Under the deal, a recruitment target of 50,000 new classroom assistants has been set. The attraction of classroom assistants to the Government is obvious – they earn far, far less than teachers and tend to take home a wage that is not viable to live on. A friend of mine recently decided not to take up a post he had been offered as a classroom assistant because he'd be taking home – in London – £150 a week

Assistants, then, are mainly drawn from the ranks of mothers, who are keen to work hours that allow them to mirror their own children's time away from school, and who are not breadwinners but additional earners. Putting them in charge of classes is a cheap option, not just in terms of salary but also in terms of training. The financial logic of enlarging the size of classes without having to provide fully trained teachers to maintain the ratios is undeniable.

But surely the pursuit of such a course is simply setting up trouble for the future. Assistants may at present be happy in terms of job definition and career structure. But as their responsibilities stack up, aren't the assistants also going to set off down a path similar to that which the teachers have been travelling for so long.

It used to be that primary teaching, in particular, relied on the same pool of intelligent, child-focused non-breadwinners to provide staffing. Now, as that exploitative little monopoly has been broken down, a new one seems to be springing up in its place.

This isn't to say that being a classroom assistant is not a rewarding job in itself. It is, and it is a fine thing, too, that jobs are available that enable dedicated parents to spend a However, part of the attraction of being a classroom assistant has got to be that, while there is not much money in it, there is not much responsibility either. One or two assistants overseeing a class of 60 – whatever they are being taught – is too much responsibility for such modestly remunerated work.

It is important that the classroom assistant's role is valued without being exploited, because if the goodwill of assistants is pushed too far, the new working patterns that our schools so desperately need will never work. Neither the Government nor the NUT should endanger a deal that offers so much that is positive. The Government must back down over the prospect of class sizes reaching 60 pupils or more, and the NUT must sign up and make a real commitment to accepting classroom assistants as valuable, useful colleagues.

d.orr@independent.co.uk