§ Mr. WillisTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what measures are being taken to ensure that the phrase teaching assistants includes(a) supervisors working with classes of children without the presence of a teacher and (b) others employed under paragraph 10 of Schedule 2 to Statutory Instrument 1663 employed to undertake specified work and that these are recorded separately from those who already appear in the teachers tables of the school workforce statistics when these figures are next collected from schools and local education authorities. [136303]
§ Mr. Miliband[holding answer 4 November 2003]: Guidance to LEAs completing the Annual Survey of Teacher Numbers and Vacancies (6180) in January 2004 will make clear that support staff who may be providing cover supervision, or who may be carrying out specified work without a teacher present under the conditions set out in the regulations, should continue to be counted separately from teachers. We would expect most of these to be counted as teaching assistants in the Annual Schools Census, but often support staff in schools undertake more than one role. We are also considering what further categorisation we might introduce for the 2005 school census.
The Workforce Agreement Monitoring Group will continue to monitor developments in the strategies used by schools to deal effectively with teacher absence as part of its wider role in overseeing the implementation of the National Agreement on raising standards and tackling workload.