Categories of other roles

Schools employ a variety of staff other than teachers. In recent years, the role of support staff has been developed and extended. In January 2020, there were 23,796 full-time equivalent support staff in maintained schools in Wales, compared with 23,594 full-time equivalent qualified teachers. For an overview of the expansion of support staff roles, see the (2013) Action Plan to Promote the Role and Development of Support Staff on the Welsh Government’s ‘School workforce management’ webpage.

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), Education Welfare Officers (EWOs), careers education, information and guidance staff and educational psychologists.

Other roles can be grouped into five categories – learning support staff; welfare and pupil support staff; specialist and technical staff; administrative staff; and site staff – and are described below. Specific job titles vary as they are decided locally.

Learning support staff

This category of staff includes: 

• Teaching assistants (TAs), learning support assistants / workers, 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), music, English or Welsh as an additional language.
• Higher level teaching assistants (HLTAs), a role created as part of the 2003 National Workload Agreement, who are experienced teaching assistants. They plan and deliver learning activities under the direction of a teacher and assess, record and report on pupils’ progress. HLTAs may also manage other classroom-based staff or supervise a class in a teacher’s absence. Regulations made under the Education Act 2002, specify when staff without Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) may carry out ‘specified work’ related to teaching and learning. 
• Early years teaching assistants who work in cooperation with a teacher, looking after the social and educational development of children aged three to five.
• Cover supervisors who provide replacement cover for teachers who are absent. 

Welfare and pupil support staff

This category of staff includes: 

• Midday supervisors, who look after the welfare of pupils in the dinner hall and playground during lunchtime. 
• Learning mentors who support, motivate and challenge pupils who are underachieving, and help pupils overcome barriers to learning caused by social, emotional and behavioural problems.
• Attendance officers / home-school liaison officers / parent support advisers.
• School nurses, who work to improve the health and well-being of children and young people. School nurses are community-based, so 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 and qualifications

Professional standards for assisting teaching were published in September 2018. These are standards for HLTAs and teaching assistants and concentrate on the essential elements of assisting teaching – pedagogy, collaboration, leadership, innovation and professional learning.

The standards have been available for schools’ use since September 2018. The new standards were finalised for use by all teaching assistants by September 2019.

Until the new standards were formally introduced in September 2019, teaching assistants seeking to become a HLTA had to present a portfolio of evidence for assessment against the standards for HTLAs detailed on pages 3-4 of the 2011 Revised Professional Standards for Education Practitioners in Wales. Prior to the introduction of the professional standards there were national standards for HLTAs only.

The introduction of the standards for assisting teaching follows on from government policy commitments expressed in the 2013 Action Plan to Promote the Role and Development of Support Staff in Schools in Wales and in the Action Plan for Education in Wales 2017-2021, Education in Wales: our National Mission, published in September 2017.

The introduction of the new standards also follows the publication in 2015 of an overarching framework of competencies in The Future Qualification Requirements for Learning Support Workers in Schools. 

In April 2016, under the Education (Wales) Act 2014, the requirement for support staff to register with the Education Workforce Council (EWC) was introduced. Those assisting teaching will now be able to use the EWC’s Professional Learning Passport (PLP) to reflect on their professional experiences and map them to the draft professional standards for assisting teaching.

Performance management

It is not mandatory for support staff to participate in performance management. However, as set out on the Welsh Government performance management webpage, it is considered good practice for schools to include support staff in the performance management process, and to give them equal opportunity to participate. In future, the Welsh Government intends to legislate to enable performance management to become mandatory for all staff. Until it does so, it recommends that schools make use of the model policy for the statutory performance management of teachers and headteachers to consider the performance management of all staff.

Pay and conditions of employment

Like teachers and headteachers, support staff working in schools are not civil servants, but employees of the local authority (LA) in community schools and voluntary controlled schools, or of the school governing body in the case of foundation schools and voluntary aided schools.

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 March 2019.

All employees who are not teachers must have access to the Local Government Pension Scheme.

Article last reviewed December 2020.