Responding to a new blog by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) on the scale of staffing challenges facing special schools, Rob Williams, senior policy advisor at school leaders’ union NAHT, said:

“Support staff play a vital and rewarding role in helping children in special schools - but these findings echo what we hear from school leaders in these settings about the difficulties they face in affording, recruiting and keeping hold of teaching assistants.

“The unpalatable truth is that in some areas, teaching assistants can earn more working in a café or supermarket, and we need the government to do more to improve their pay

“Access to specialist staff, such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists, is also an issue amid workforce shortages, and neither are special schools immune to the recruitment and retention crisis facing teaching, where action to boost pay, ease workload, and to go further in fundamentally reforming school inspection, is desperately needed.

“Funding is a big issue, however, and last year 84% of school leaders we surveyed said they would be forced to reduce the number of teaching assistants or hours worked by teaching assistants in the following three years due to budgetary pressures. It’s therefore vital that pay rises are properly funded by the government so that already pressured school budgets do not have to reduce provision elsewhere to pay for them.”