Welfare assistants: Are they equipped for their role?

Policy Implementation Difficulties and Special Education

“…This was reflected in recruitment policies and, consequently, the LEA did not expect applicants to have relevant special needs experience, training or qualifications. Indeed, as the data showed, although many of the welfare assistants in this study had good experience of children, including school experience, only one in five were familiar with disability and special needs (for a detailed discussion see Clayton, 1990b), very few had received training that would equip them for their job and less than half held formal educational qualifications of the most basic kind. In view of their new educational role, this is a worrying situation but by no means unusual.…”

An ‘Extra Pair of Hands’?

“…The use of an 'extra pair of hands' in the classroom is not a new phenomenon (Balshaw, 1991(Balshaw, , 1999Clayton, 1990;Fletcher-Campbell, 1992;Lee and Mawson, 1998). According to Clayton (1993), a variety of terms have been used to describe these post holders.…”

“…Studies undertaken in England in the 1990s (e.g. Clayton, 1990;Fletcher-Campbell, 1992;Moyles and Suschitzky, 1997b) show how the role of SEN assistant has developed from working one-to-one with a child with special needs to supporting a special needs child within groups in a mainstream classroom. Many of these assistants did not have job descriptions, and those who did often found themselves undertaking a variety of tasks.…”

Support for special needs

“…The contrast between within-school and toschool support was striking and provides the basis for this paper. Readers interested in the broader issues relating to the Wiltshire welfare assistants study could refer to a number of recently published articles and book chapters (Clayton 1989a(Clayton , 1989b(Clayton , 1990a(Clayton , 1990b and to Clayton (1991) for a full account of the research project.…”