Where Will Qualified Teaching Assistants Come From?

Every November the Department for Education counts the school workforce, and every year the headline is about teachers. This year’s count, published last month, is worth reading for the line underneath. Teacher numbers fell by 1,900 full-time equivalents, to 466,400. Teaching assistant numbers rose by 6,200, to 295,200. Support staff as a whole are now 518,200 FTE, and teaching assistants make up more than half of them.

That is not a blip. The gap between the two lines has been widening for a decade, and the reasons are familiar to anyone running a school: special educational needs provision has grown faster than specialist staffing, one-to-one support is written into more education, health and care plans every year, and a teaching assistant on a term-time contract costs a fraction of a teacher. Whatever the policy debate about whether this is the right shape for a school workforce, it is the shape we have.

What I do not see discussed is where the qualified ones are supposed to come from.

The job has changed, the entry route has not

Twenty years ago a teaching assistant post was something a parent at the school gate might pick up: a few hours a week, learned on the job, no qualification required. Some of those roles still exist. But look at the vacancies schools and trusts are posting now and the picture is different. A Level 3 qualification is listed as essential or strongly preferred in most, because the role now means delivering planned interventions, supporting pupils with complex needs, and in the case of higher level teaching assistants, covering classes.

The pay reflects that, up to a point. Under the 2026 NJC award, agreed in August and backdated to April, a Level 3 teaching assistant on spinal column points 7 to 11 is on £27,274 to £29,071 full-time equivalent. Most are term-time only, so take-home is closer to 80 to 85 per cent of that. It is not a salary anyone retrains for lightly. But for a care worker, a retail supervisor or a parent returning to work, it is a step up with stable hours and a pension, and it is in every town in the country.

The problem is the route in. The Level 3 Diploma in Supporting Teaching and Learning is a 44-credit, portfolio-assessed qualification. It needs a school placement, because several units have to be observed in a real classroom and simulation is not allowed. Done through a college, it is typically a one-year course with a weekly attendance commitment. Done as an apprenticeship, it needs an employer willing to take on an apprentice at apprentice rates and release them for off-the-job training.

Both of those routes work for an 18-year-old. Neither works well for the people who actually fill these roles.

Who is actually applying

We enrol adults onto the Level 3 teaching assistant diploma online, and I have read a great many of their application forms. The modal applicant is a woman in her thirties or forties. She is already working in a school, usually as a Level 2 or unqualified assistant, or she is in a job she wants to leave and has a child at a local primary. She cannot attend a college on a weekday evening because of childcare, and she cannot take an apprenticeship wage because she has a mortgage.

What she needs is a qualification she can study around a working week, that her school will recognise, that costs less than a month’s pay in total, and that gets her the observed practice hours without a formal apprenticeship. That is a product description, and the further education sector has been slow to build it.

Online providers have stepped into the gap. That is partly a good thing, because it means thousands of people are now qualifying who would otherwise not have. It is also a sector with no quality floor. A prospective learner searching for a Level 3 teaching assistant course will find prices from under £300 to over £1,500 for what is, on the Ofqual register, the same qualification number, and almost no information about tutor support, marking turnaround, placement help or what happens if she cannot finish in twelve months.

What a working route looks like

I do not think the answer is to push adults back into the college or apprenticeship model. I think it is to hold online provision to the standard a good college would expect, and to say what that standard is. Four things matter.

The awarding body and the qualification number should be on the front of the page. If a provider will not say which Ofqual-regulated body certificates the course, the learner should walk away. TQUK, NCFE CACHE and City and Guilds all offer the Level 3 diploma; they are not interchangeable with an in-house certificate.

Placement support has to be real. The observed units are the part adult learners most often fail to complete, not because they cannot do the work but because nobody helped them secure a setting. A provider should have a template letter for schools, a clear statement of what the school is agreeing to, and a named person the learner can ask.

Marking and tutor contact should be measured in days, not weeks. A learner who submits a unit and hears nothing for a month stops. We mark within three to five working days and the completion difference against our earlier, slower cohorts was stark.

Pricing should be transparent and monthly. Adults budget monthly. A course that can be paid for at £60 a month and cancelled is one that a care worker on £24,000 can start; one that asks for £800 up front is not.

None of this is radical. It is what a further education college does as a matter of course for its 16 to 19 cohort. The question for the sector is whether it is willing to apply the same expectations to the 295,000 people now doing a job that schools cannot run without, most of whom will never set foot in a college building.

Schools will keep hiring teaching assistants, because the pupils needing support are already in the classroom. The only open question is whether the people filling those posts arrive qualified. If the sector wants a say in that, it needs to care about how adults qualify, not just how school leavers do.

By Kate Strohm is Managing Director of Lift College.