Categories of other roles
Schools employ a variety of staff other than teachers. The article on ‘Education Staff Responsible for Guidance in Early Childhood and School Education’ covers some of these support staff roles, including Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs or SEN coordinators); Education Welfare Officers (EWO); careers education, information and guidance staff; school counsellors; and educational psychologists.
Other roles, described below, can be grouped into five categories – learning support staff; welfare and pupil support staff; specialist and technical staff; administrative staff; and site staff. Specific job titles vary as they are decided locally.
Learning support staff
This category of staff includes:
- Teaching assistants (TAs), learning support assistants (LSAs), or classroom assistants, who work alongside teachers in the classroom, helping pupils with their learning on an individual or group basis. Some specialise in areas such as literacy, numeracy, special educational needs (SEN) or music.
- Nursery assistants / nursery nurses, who work in co-operation with a teacher, looking after the social and educational development of children aged 3 to 4/5.
Welfare and pupil support staff
This category of staff includes:
- Lunchtime / midday supervisors who look after the welfare of pupils in the dinner hall and playground during lunchtime.
- Parent support officers or advisers.
- School nurses, who work to promote healthy lifestyles in schools by giving support, training and advice on health and well-being to children, parents and school staff. They also provide health appraisals for children entering primary and post-primary schools. School nurses are community-based, so are not directly employed by the school, but are linked to a school or group of schools and work across education and health services.
Specialist and technical staff
This category of staff includes:
- librarians / media resources officers
- ICT technicians / network managers
- data managers
- science technicians / design technology technicians.
Administrative staff
These staff include:
- school business managers / bursars / finance officers
- administrative and clerical assistants
- examinations officers / managers (secondary schools only, responsible for submitting exam entries, organising exam timetables, overseeing the exams and processing the results).
Site staff
These staff include:
- premises managers; cleaning, caretaking and catering staff.
Training, qualifications and performance management
A wide range of continuing professional development and training opportunities are available for support staff employed in schools. This includes programmes, such as apprenticeships in children’s care, learning and development, which can lead to accredited qualifications at Level 2 to Level 6 of the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF).
There are no professional standards or training and qualification requirements for learning support assistants / teaching assistants in schools. Training and qualifications requirements for individual posts are determined by employing authorities when advertising posts.
It is not mandatory for support staff to participate in performance management, although many schools have arrangements in place.
Pay and conditions of employment
Like teachers and headteachers, support staff working in schools are not civil servants, but employees of the Education Authority (EA), the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools or the board of governors depending on the legal category of school.
There is no agreed national framework for support staff pay or conditions of service, but the National Agreement on Pay and Conditions of Service (known as ‘the Green Book’), has a bearing on many support staff contracts. The Green Book is produced by the National Joint Council for Local Government Services and was last updated in May 2018.
All employees who are not teachers must have access to the Local Government Pension Scheme for Northern Ireland.
Article last reviewed December 2020.