In recent years, Teach Portsmouth has supported the recruitment of teaching assistants.
This has been through the development of information events and taster sessions. These events have produced early successes, driving volumes of people towards vacancies, apprenticeships, and training. However, stakeholders have identified the need to support the retention of teaching assistants too.
To understand the Portsmouth picture, three specific activities have been identified, as part of a discovery phase. To date, the reasons why people leave have been anecdotal, from stakeholders who aren’t teaching assistants themselves. While their views are important, those of teaching assistants are also needed.
Pay and workload is often cited as some of the main reasons but this discovery phase aims to look at other opportunities that are unique to Portsmouth that may encourage people stay and progress in their career.
What are these three activities?
To help us build a picture of teaching assistant retention in the city, three activities will take place to gain feedback from different stakeholder groups.
- Ask academies and LA maintained schools to provide generalised exit interview feedback
- Hold two virtual focus groups with teaching assistants and senior leaders
- Circulate an anonymous survey for teaching assistants to complete
How will this data be used?
The data gained from these three activities will be put into a report and shared with different stakeholders with a series of recommendations. Once a consensus is reached, it is anticipated that a campaign/initiative or event that supports teaching assistant retention will be implemented.
Important dates
Schools will be contacted in the coming weeks about being part of these three activities. This information will be shared in an upcoming PEP bulletin and directly with senior leaders. We would encourage as many schools to participate as possible to ensure we capture the right information across primary, secondary and specialist settings.
- Exit interview feedback – Deadline for feedback: Friday 21 June 2024
- Teaching assistant online focus group – Wednesday 15 May 2024, 3.30pm – 4.30pm
- Senior leader online focus group – Thursday 16 May 2024, 3.30pm – 4.30pm
- Anonymous survey – Deadline: Friday 21 June 2024
Those who choose to participate in the online focus group and anonymous survey can opt-in to win one of three £25 Amazon vouchers as a thank you. These will be sent within five working days of the activity taking place.
What’s next?
To help encourage your staff to take part, we have put together a tool kit of text which you can use to promote these activities. This contains text to help communicate the virtual focus groups and survey to teaching assistants.
Alternatively, if you have staff members who would like to participate in this activity, please email [email protected] and one of the team will be in touch.
Download tool kit