Introduction

This worker’s inquiry is based on the year I spent working as a teaching assistant in a secondary school. This school had only opened a few years prior, as part of a mid-sized academy chain based in a predominantly Black and South Asian, working-class area in South London. In many senses it represented the archetypal school in contemporary Britain - but it also had its own particularities that allowed for the opening up of novel paths of struggle.

This inquiry is slightly dated - I quit my job as a teaching assistant around three years ago, and have not worked in a school since. A lot has happened in that time, including a round of national school strikes, so naturally, there will be things that are not up to date. However, I hope recalling my experiences can still offer some use to those continuing to work and organise in the sector today.

The Workforce

Teachers

First, I want to give a general overview of the composition of the workforce within the school. When people think of school workers, they usually think of teachers. Teachers are obviously a huge part of school workforces, but they are by no means exhaustive. In my school, teachers made up just over a third of all staff. They were all university educated, mostly white and under the age of 40. The gender split, however, was fairly even. Around a third were either trainees or newly qualified teachers (NQTs), meaning they were required to do additional assessments outside normal teaching duties.

This hints at the level of attrition that existed within the teaching workforce - teacher turnover stood at almost 40% during the year I worked there. Turnover rates were usually higher in those subjects in which the school was already short staffed: in our grossly understaffed ‘Modern Foreign Languages’ department, every single member of the department who worked there had quit by the end of the academic year. The record for a resignation was just three days after originally starting.

Teaching Assistants

After teachers, the next biggest group of workers in the school were teaching assistants. This is the job that I did. We made up about 15% of the school workforce. Again, we were all university graduates, and gender wise, fairly balanced. However, we were mostly in our early twenties, and racially the most diverse part of the workforce. Turnover amongst TAs was particularly high - in the year I worked there, it stood at over 80%. By the time I had quit, I was the second longest-running worker in our department, longer than even our line manager.

We also earnt some of the lowest salaries in the school: around £18,500 a year when I started (including our additional central London weighting). Part of the reason this wage was so low was because, unlike teachers, we were employed on ‘term time only’ contracts. This meant that we were technically not working full-time, and therefore, not on full-time pay. Second jobs were common. Some of the TAs would work at the school’s ‘summer school’ to earn extra money over the holidays. Others had evening gigs working in hospitality or did freelance tutoring. We all found it increasingly hard to live on our wages - even more so for those who had caring responsibilities. I was regularly in overdraft debt, at the end of each month often praying the gates would be left open at my local station so I could save my £3 train fare. Grifting free lunches from the school canteen became so rife that the school management had to introduce a new registry system to put a stop to it.

Other School Workers

The remainder of the workforce were made up of various other small workforces - such as cleaners, caterers, welfare officers, IT, admin, facilities workers, as well as art and music technicians. Some of these, such as cleaners and catering staff, were outsourced to subcontractors. Others, such as admin and IT, had several “apprentices”, who could be paid less despite often doing exactly the same work as others in their department. There were also music teachers who worked various days in the school on freelance contracts.

Within the school workforce, there was a high level of stratification. Teaching assistants, by the nature of our job, had a lot of contact with other members of the workforce, particularly teachers and welfare, but also maintenance, IT and catering. This didn’t necessarily mean tensions were smooth between us and all these groups. Relationships between teachers and teaching assistants could often be fraught, with a tendency for some teachers to treat us as their inferiors, rather than coworkers. There were, of course, also teachers who made a significant effort to break this divisive and demanding attitude, for whom I had a lot of respect.

Many other teams were more isolated. Administration, maintenance and IT work, whilst they interacted a lot together, was fairly cut off from the rest of the school. Although teachers and teaching assistants interacted with them at lunchtimes, caterers were also fairly isolated from the rest of the workforce, due to different working hours and subcontraction. Cleaners were the most isolated in the school: partially again because they were outsourced, but also due to differences in language and because they only started work at 4pm, when most other workers had left or were finishing work.

Attempts to bridge these divides then were not easy, with it taking effort and care to build relationships between workforces. The fact that very few workers other than teachers had previously been recruited into the school’s union branch didn’t help this situation.

There also existed a final group of workers at the school: construction workers. Continuing building works meant that construction workers were a constant presence on site. Unfortunately, they were almost completely separated - both physically and technically through in their subcontraction - from the rest of the workforce. However, there was an interesting example of working-class solidarity that emerged from this workforce during my time at the school: when an anti-vaxx demonstration was held one day outside the school during hometime, and demonstrators began to assault students and staff who were trying to get home, the construction workers on-site immediately downed tools and came down to the entrance, forming a human shield with teachers to defend them. Whilst this could be put down to an act of basic human decency, the willingness of these workers to stop work, despite potential repercussions, to come to the defence of others was extremely encouraging. Thinking about how to integrate this workforce, their demands, and their industrial power into school worker organising is then a notable question for those of us who understand the importance of industrial unionism.

The Senior Leadership Team

The ‘Senior Leadership Team’ (SLT) also made up a significant part of the workforce: there were as many senior managers as there were teaching assistants. Here I am including vice-principals, deputy heads or headteachers, defined by their main responsibilities being to manage staff and “student behaviour”. At the time, all senior managers at my school all earned at least £60,000 a year - with the headteacher on six figures. The SLT played a highly repressive function in relation to the workforce and student population. This was best highlighted by their social status within the school. They avoided using the staff room, were generally not welcome on Friday at after work drinks, and when I visited the picket line at the school during the last round of school strikes, they were almost exclusively the only members of staff who went into work. In this sense, their class position within the workforce was pretty clear-cut. However, this also often manifested itself the other way round: for example, part way through the school year, the teaching assistant team were sent an email banning us from using the kitchenette we shared with SLT.

The Students

It’s important to recognise that it is not only the composition of the workforce in the school that is important. The student population are also incredibly important to consider, particularly in considering how militant movements may emerge in schools. Examples in recent years - such as the role of student protests in the anti-racist struggles at Pimlico Academy in 2021 - demonstrate the importance of students in initiating new struggles, escalating ongoing struggles, and often highlighting political blind spots within the workforce.

In my school, whilst the workforce was mostly white, the students were overwhelmingly from black and south-asian backgrounds. Whilst, like many places in London, the class demographics were slightly more mixed, the students were still overwhelmingly working-class, the majority living on the large council estates near the school, and high levels assigned ‘pupil premium’.

School students can often be unfairly viewed as apolitical, blank canvases to be influenced by older activists. However, in my experience, this is totally untrue. Large numbers of students were tapped into a number of political issues: Black Lives Matter, feminism, and LGBTQ+ liberation. It was a running joke on PHSCE days, where social issues would be discussed, that students were the ones educating the teachers on these topics. A level of politicisation amongst the student body is perhaps exemplified by the actions of several year 7 students, who during the Sheikh Jarrah protests, removed the Israeli flags that were a part of a display in their playground.

On a more day-to-day level, I also witnessed students engaging in the struggle against schoolwork. For example, our school had a “three strikes and you’re out” rule, where students were given two warnings for minor disruptions to lessons - such as talking, moving around the classroom, or shouting out. On their third “infraction”, they would receive a detention. In many classes, students worked together, using up their two warnings to disrupt the lesson before another student took over. This way, lessons could be continually disrupted, preventing any work from being done, whilst no students received a detention due to the spreading out of their warnings. Whilst perhaps slightly frustrating a member of teaching staff, acts such as these represented the working-class creativity and resistance that existed within the classroom. Rather than being a politically neutral body, the students were a group who could, and did, take collective political action.

In an attempt to appeal to some sort of unique behavioural pedagogy that could be packaged up and sold in seminars by the academy federation, students were subject to increasingly authoritarian forms of management. One of the recently hired assistant heads at the school, whose particular remit was “student behaviour”, loved to boast about his military background. These authoritarian behavioural measures included being lined up and walked to lessons in silence, a culture of shouting at students, and heavy-handed isolation policies. Students were frequently sent to outside pupil referral units (PRUs), and whilst working there an internal PRU was set up within the school. This was grimly described by our deputy head as a ‘doom room for students who could not be trusted in the general population of the school’. Students were sent to the internal PRU not for any particular infraction, but rather for being generally regarded as a ‘bad student’. Within the unit, groups of students would be isolated in silence from the rest of the school for a week or two, with no particular school work to do. If you talked to the person next to you, slouched, turned around, etc., you were shouted at. The morbid idea was that this verbal abuse would encourage some sort of Pavlovian response, magically transforming these students into silent, perfectly postured children. A majority of the teachers backed the introduction of this unit within a union meeting, arguing for it as part of “workplace safety”. However, amongst the teaching assistants, it horrified us. Initially the school had wanted us to staff this unit with, however we collectively refused and the school was forced to hire a new separate member of staff instead.

The educational value of school was bleak for students too. Little beyond the bare minimum of core subjects were offered to students, and vocational training was essentially non-existent. Class sizes were packed out, with staff given little time to prepare for classes. It is unsurprisingly then in this situation, that student absenteeism was rife. Whilst a sombre situation, I only hope this experience in absenteeism taught the students some useful skills for when they will enter the workforce.

Unsurprisingly, the environment in the school often created conflictual relations between students and workers. Even those parts of the workforce that could more effectively bridge this divide were still involved in this daily conflict. In some senses, the old ultra-left slogan from May ‘68 felt pervasively accurate: ‘all teachers are cops!’. This harsh and authoritarian environment was produced by management from the top-down, but was also often also reinforced by workers from the bottom-up. Fomenting subversive teaching styles, that refuse the disciplinarian logic that the school tried to implant in its staff, felt important for bridging this divide and paving the way for more joint struggles by students and workers: against managerial authoritarianism, and for a better resourced, more holistic education.

The Work

As a teaching assistant, officially our role was to prepare and execute 1-on-1 ‘interventions’ both inside and outside of classes. However, in reality we were there partially as a box-ticking exercise, and partially to fill gaps in the general work of the school.

An average day would start with arriving at 8:30am, often diving straight to the staff room to make a cup of instant coffee before arriving fashionably late to our morning briefing with the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo). We would then have a full day scheduled of six 50-minute lessons, supporting students in the classroom. A couple of times a week, after school ended at 3:15pm, we were then meant to either undertake an afterschool duty - such as running a homework support session or our assigned after school club. On top of this, throughout the week we had lunch and break duties. In theory, you were meant to meticulously patrol the playground upholding all the school’s ridiculous rules. However, in reality, this largely consisted of wandering aimlessly around the playground wearing a high vis jacket. The working day would also usually involve a series of smaller tasks. For instance, taking students with physical accessibility needs to their lessons in the school lift, or escorting certain vulnerable students out of lessons to a quiet space where they could relax.

We were assigned to assist lessons first-and-foremost based on whether or not any students within each class had an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan), who the school received additional government funding for, and were therefore legally required to give a certain level of additional support. This level of support, of course, did not happen, as it was mathematically impossible to assign a teaching assistant to each lesson in which a student had an EHCP. Therefore, within this group of students, differentiation was made between those who required full-time support, those who could cope with support just in their core lessons, and those who could survive with even less than this. Rather than supporting students flourish, our job was reduced to scraping together whatever we could to simply help students get-by.

Within the classroom, different students needed to be supported in different ways. For instance, some could do their classwork with ease, but just needed help concentrating on the task in front of them. Others struggled with the work itself, and needed more in-depth support in re-explaining key concepts from the lesson at a more accessible pace. For the most part, a lot of the tasks we did in lessons felt like firefighting - we were not helping students truly learn or grow, but rather just helping them get through that lesson, without touching on the base issues that meant they struggled more than others. For instance, working with students who couldn’t read or write felt particularly ridiculous. We were instructed by the school to sit in their lessons and write notes from them (which they couldn’t read afterwards anyway). Rather than creating personalised 1-on-1 interventions that could support them in learning to read and write, we were instead there to create some sort of facade that made it look like they were doing work for whenever OFSTED came into the school.

The teachers we worked with in lessons also dictated much of what we did and often added to the frustration of the job. Some teachers were happy to let us do whatever we felt was best, whereas others set strict guidelines on which students we were meant to work with and when we could work with them. One teacher even tried to ban me from speaking to students in his class as it was ‘too disruptive’, an instruction I politely ignored. This often made us feel infantilised: TAs and teachers were meant to be colleagues, on equal pegging in the classroom but fulfilling different roles. Yet often we were treated as subordinates. Sometimes this attitude was stated explicitly: I was once told at the pub by a coworker, who was a teacher, that it was right teaching assistants were paid substantially less due to our lack of qualifications. This was despite the fact that multiple TAs in our team were qualified teachers with multiple years experience in the sector.

As teaching assistants, we often discussed the capitalist logic behind how our work was organised: senior management were more concerned with the quantity of our work, of how many lessons with how many students they could mark us off as being present in, with little concern with regard to the actual quality of what we were doing. We were being overworked for the little-to-negative gain of our students.

In this sense, the day-to-day work we were doing was incredibly alienating. Being a teaching assistant is not well paid nor is it easy work, and therefore most people chose to do it partially out of a desire to do something socially useful. To then be forced to work in a manner which not only felt pointless, but sometimes even actively harmful, was gut wrenching. Nothing represented the hollowness of our work more than the training sessions we were regularly sent on. In these, we were repeatedly taught: working in lessons with students without any preparation was proven to have worse pedagogical outcomes than not working with those students at all. It was reiterated to us over and over again in these training sessions that we should be spending no more than 50% of our time in the classroom, with the remaining time focused on preparation work and 1-on-1 sessions with students. Yet, our management, who forced us to attend these training sessions, were still compelling us to work almost 100% of our hours in the classroom. It quickly became obvious that sending us to these training courses was just another box-ticking exercise in of itself.

We were also continually forced by the senior management team to take on responsibilities far beyond our remit and job description. This included being told to monitor a severely diabetic student’s injections and dietary needs, without being given any corresponding medical training; being asked to write a schoolwide fire safety plan; and one HLTA being made to cover as an art teacher for a whole half-term without any additional remuneration. This situation made us feel not only exploited, but extremely vulnerable and worried about the safety of the school.

The Union

Despite being a relatively new school, there was a fairly strong trade union density. There was also only one union present - the National Education Union (NEU) - giving the workplace an advantage over older schools that tend to have a mix of different unions for teachers and support staff. However, although the vast majority of teachers were in the union, only a few support staff were. Nor did the high level of teacher membership translate into much action. Whilst taking strike action over working conditions was a constant conversation between staff members, the outcome of these conversations always ended with people agreeing “to the rep about it”, after which any initiative would fizzle out.

The structures for getting involved in the union were opaque, as we had no local committee for our school, just a borough-wide branch that met once a month and discussed mostly abstract motions. When I started, I spoke to one of the reps and told them I was really keen to get involved in the union. However, for the most part, I was parred off. What made things even more complicated were the composition of the reps. We had two reps during the time I worked there: the first was my line manager, and the second was another head of department (who later became a member of SLT). This was problematic, to say the least.

Throughout the year I worked in the school, only one local workplace meeting was called. Before this meeting, our school rep cornered me in the pub and warned me not to “moan and complain” about working conditions at the union meeting the next day, as they wanted to keep the meeting positive. The meeting then the next day was dominated by patting the union on the back for winning the introduction of the internal PRU. Whilst union branch cultures vary from school to school, many seem to follow a similar trend of primarily focusing on teachers’ working conditions - and within that primarily “health and safety” demands that rotate around the expulsion and further repression of students - with little discussion about the issues faced by the broader school workforce, or the wider social responsibility our struggles as school workers hold.

Self-Organised Struggles

When I started my job, despite my somewhat negative interactions with the school’s union, I still tried to recruit the other teaching assistants into it, with partial success. However, our collective interest in involving ourselves in the union U-turned pretty early on in the school year.

One day we arrived at work to the news that management had restructured our timetables. Originally, we had four free periods a week scheduled in, for us to use for planning and preparation for our work in the classroom. In our new timetables, we would have no free periods. We were immediately outraged, and before having to run off to our classes, we had a conversation about what we would do about it. It was agreed we’d arrange a meeting with our union rep and file a collective grievance. However, after just a day, the process already felt too frustrating and slow-moving for us. One teaching assistant then proposed an alternative strategy: why don’t we just keep taking our free periods as and when we needed them? The management of the school was so chaotic that, bar a few particular classes, no-one would notice if we didn’t turn up to all our assigned lessons. Even if they did clock on, so long as we all did it, they wouldn’t be able to take action against us. We took up this direct action strategy, and as predicted, none of us were ever disciplined, and we retained our free periods - and in fact often took even more than we had previously had.

This experience definitively changed our collective approach. From then on, we placed less faith in the union to solve our problems, and instead we took upon ourselves to solve them. Following this first campaign, we then took action against the introduction of clocking-in technology. Partway through the year, school management had announced they were introducing a digital log-in at the staff entrance, that involved tapping your ID card. They claimed this was purely for fire-safety reasons, but we knew it would be used to track our attendance at work. It was agreed that none of us teaching assistants would clock-in using this system, and we also encouraged as many other staff as possible to join us. A significant minority of the workforce indefinitely refused to clock-in, rendering it impractical as a monitoring system. Again, none of us were ever penalised in any way for taking this action.

Taking part in these informal, self-organised campaigns against workplace changes bolstered our confidence. As teaching assistants, we were also not too worried about getting fired. Although our work was not particularly ‘skilled’, there were hardly many people lining up to do this extremely low-paid work. Finding a new job at another school was really not difficult. We began taking bolder subversive action in our day-to-day work. We refused to do tasks assigned to us if we thought they were just bureaucratic exercises, or not part of our job description. We refused to maintain certain discipline expectations that we saw as too authoritarian and repressive. We had created a form of moral economy within our work team. We aimed to do the work we felt was important, and do it well. But where we saw our work as being not useful, and in many cases even actively harmful, we would not do it, so long as it didn’t create more work for any of our other colleagues.

For a period, our workplace was in a state of low-level guerilla warfare: with senior management on one side, and us as self-organised workers on the other. However, to our own confidence, none of us ever received any disciplinary action for any of these actions. In fact, in an attempt to get us to be better workers, the school did the opposite, and gave almost all of us a 12% pay rise. The one teaching assistant excluded from this pay rise was neurodivergent. We saw this as a discriminatory move by management to exclude a worker seen as more docile due to their neurodivergency (they weren’t, and were in fact one of the first teaching assistants to have joined the union). We made it explicit that we saw this as unacceptable, and that we would back them up in complaining to the school management. The situation was quickly rectified and they received the same pay rise as the rest of us.

However, our activity eventually ran up against its limitations. Although we were self-organised to a high enough degree to prevent management incursions into our working conditions, this organisation always remained somewhat informal: formed in staffroom and pub conversations, rather than any formalised structure or committee. Arguably for this reason, we never managed to expand our self-organisation far beyond our team of teaching assistants. In some ways too, the action we were taking, whilst incredibly empowering, was also a form of self-management: we skipped certain lessons so we could better prepare for others, never going as far to refuse work completely and go on strike. Instead of allowing this self-organisation to be built on, and use them to launch bigger and more ambitious struggles, we instead allowed it to fizzle out.

After six months of our self-organised campaigns, the majority of my then co-workers quit, being exhausted by their jobs and the constant struggle against them. However, in one final act of resistance, they organised themselves to space out each of their resignations by about a week each. This drove our senior management up the wall, leaving them to clear up a mess time after time, not knowing each time if the resignation wave was over or if another was yet to come in a few days.

Following these mass resignations, our workforce was restructured. A new level of line management - in the form of a “deputy SENCo” - was created. New management practices were implemented, and a new workforce was selected to replace those who had left. These new teaching assistants were, for the most part, very different demographically from those they had replaced: they were generally older, more likely to have dependents, and with longer career histories in the education sector. As a result, our political composition was suddenly contested, to be recomposed or decomposed, with the forms of solidarity that had perhaps come more naturally to a young and mobile workforce up in the air. In these first few weeks, those of us that remained fought to instill a counter-subjectivity into these new colleagues, in terms of acceptable work attitudes. Through this, we managed to keep some of the gains we had made through our prior self-organisation, such as maintaining the taking of free periods regardless of official schedules. Other norms that we had formed prior to the recomposition of our workforce were lost.

Conclusions

What can I conclude from this experience then? The first is that organisation is key. Dissatisfaction, anger, and an idea of taking collective action is widespread in the sector. However, often so also is disorganisation. Not necessarily in terms of simply being in the union etc. (secondary education has one of the highest trade union densities in the country), but in terms of a self-organised workforce capable of taking rapid action across its various divisions in job title. To a degree, the technical composition of our work as teaching assistants allowed us to take unofficial action frequently and with immediacy. However, a lack of structure to this organisation - to bring it into the light and make it visible - meant that the struggles we were involved in failed to spread outwards across the school workforce and reproduce themselves in the long-term. Whilst it was an excellent lesson in class struggle, that has stuck with me far beyond leaving that job, we were nowhere near organised enough to even begin to be able to offer a model that could be reproduced across other schools, and ultimately build a form of working-class organisation capable of taking on the capitalist state as a whole. It is a deep personal regret of mine that during these fairly active self-organised struggles, we did not seize the initiative and form a more rooted, longer lasting structure, such as an unofficial workers’ committee or even a school workers’ bulletin.

Secondly, schools are important hubs of working-class experimentation and creativity. Secondary schools, in particular, are often large in staff numbers, but not unmanageably so. There is both a high level of disaffection with management, and a high level of interaction between certain workforces, that, in theory, makes joined up action easier to organise than in many other workplaces. The success of a model of worker self-organisation in one school could also easily spread to dozens, hundreds, thousands of other schools within the education system, given their basic similarities as workplaces and connection through the state. Communists therefore should take them seriously as sites of class struggle with potentially serious ramifications. In this sense, again, I also have huge regrets of quitting my job at the time I did, rather than sticking it out in my school for the long haul and being able to try and implement the lessons of my experiences so far.

Thirdly and finally, students must be taken seriously as part of our struggles. Not in the sense of making a school system that is ‘fair’ or ‘meritocratic’ for them to engage in, but rather by taking them seriously as political agents in their own right, who can and do contribute to the broader class struggle. Taking their lead on thinking through what an actual liberated education looks like is so important - not just to furthering our struggles, but to retaining our humanity in a job that can so often crush your spirit.