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Why too much education support can be as bad as no education support

Jun 19, 2026

At an Inclusion community of practice, I was recently asked to present about how we utilise education support staff1 at our school. In Victoria in Australia over the past few years there has been a continued focus on inclusive education in school2 and with that has come a number of changes to how we deploy our education support staff and our expectations of them within the classroom. Our focus has been to break the old habits of support in our setting which often involved a staff member tagged one to one with a student or small group of students and more towards a model where the education support staff would circulate the room to be of benefit to any students in need during that lesson. This is supported by large scale bodies of research out of the United Kingdom from the Department of Education3 which showed that often the students who receive the most support do not make the most progress

The EEF released a SEND Evidence review a few years ago and amongst the 180 pages of analysis of research around practice for students with additional needs there is a section on the effective deploying of Teachers Aides. One piece of evidence they found was as follows:

“the ineffective and separate instruction delivered by untrained and unsupervised TAs as well as their constant physical presence inadvertently undermine the inclusion, learning, socialization and independence of students with disabilities, and the pedagogical roles of their teachers.” (Sharma & Salend, 2016, p125).

This highlights a key issue that can occur in the use of education support staff in classrooms. Too often teachers see a supported student and think “they have support, I don’t need to worry about them now”. This then means the teacher is then relying on the education support staff member being able to follow their instruction, while managing and supporting this student with additional needs. It is akin to expecting the ES member to be a student in your class, teach a student in your class and manage any other complexities of their additional needs simultaneously, all of which is going to create a massive cognitive burden on the ES member. Another issue that can arise when students are tagged one to one with a support member is that learning can become too scaffolded and the student does not actually learn as much as they can and should. This does not occur maliciously. This occurs out of the kindness and compassion these quality human beings feel for the students. They do not want the student to feel like they can’t do something so they help them where ever they can.

This can lead to what David Didau refers to as ‘Satnav teaching’ where the student follows the procedure of the task, arrives at the desired upon destination however, they have not thought about any of the processes and therefore are unlikely to understand the work they have been doing. The support which exists to close the achievement gap has effectively widened it by caring too much.

In this instance we’ve had an enormous push at attempting to upskill our ES staff by having our ES staff no longer tagged to a single student unless there are complex functional needs which need one to one support to access the learning at all (eg. a scribe). Instead we want out staff members to circulate the room under the guise that they are there for all students. The idea that only students with additional needs can and do need support has left the building under the multi-tiered systems of support approach within our school. By focussing on improving our strong core tier 1 instruction learning should be pitched at a level where all students in the classroom have an access point and should feel some success early in the class. Then responsive tier 2 interventions can help to bridge the gaps for any learners who may need more support on the day. These interventions could be either at a whole class level from the teacher or from the ES staff member to any student who need support while they are circulating the room.

This circulation can also help to manage student behaviour as another body moving around the room means the chance of off-task behaviour can begin to decline and additionally this means that the teacher is more likely to check in with any students with additional needs as the expert in the room and help provide the support which can help to close the achievement gap that might exist.

Kylie Hoey made a brilliant analogy to explain this process clearly which I have stolen and used constantly ever since:

🚗 🚙 2 cars are driving down the highway.

🚗 Car A is driving at 80km an hour, increasing to 110km over the journey.

🚙 Car B starts at 50kms an hour, and increases its speed to 65km an hour over the journey.

🚗 🚙 Both cars show progress of speed, but the gap between the two speeds widen significantly over the journey.

🚗 Car A slowly moves further and further ahead of car B 🚙

🚗_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🚙

This is what often happens to our at-risk learners. Any progress at all is seen as success, even when that progress actually puts them further behind.

To create my own slightly more off-kilter analogy, our education support is a bit like a new pair of underwear. Initially, it is supportive in all the right places, it might even feel too supportive at times. Then over time the support slowly fades, yet the emotional connection remains and perhaps even grows if they’re considered a lucky pair. Ideally, eventually all support will be gone and it will be time to start the process all over again.

Conversely in another study it was stated more positively:

“that trained and supported TAs, either working on a one to one basis or in a small group, helped primary-aged children with literacy and language problems to make statistically significant gains in learning when compared to similar children who did not receive TA support.” (Farrell et al., 2010, p439)

This has helped to inform our next area of focus in developing our approach to Education support.

Firstly, it is our teachers responsibility to inform and instruct the Education support staff on what adjustments are required for student success in the lesson. This should happen at the start of or before the lesson if possible and therefore help the ES set the student up for success from the moment the lesson begins. This aims to avoid previous issues that used to occur where teachers would again think that the student is going to be fine before they had support available and the ES would then be left to teach the student the content, they would adapt resources so that they were accessible to the student and they would even sometimes do some of the work for them. The trouble with this is that even though a large number of our ES are incredibly experienced or studying to become teachers, they are unlikely to be an expert in that subject. They have not planned that subject or sequenced the learning. They have not created or planned how it will be assessed. Unless the teacher guides the support that is occurring in the classroom, that support has the risk of actually having a negative impact on the students learning progress.

Secondly, we have begun looking for opportunities to provide professional learning specifically to our ES staff. To be transparent, we had a fair idea of areas we wanted to work on already but we conducted observations of our team to get an idea of what is actually happening in the classroom on the daily basis so that we could celebrate the great things staff are doing through their own initiative while also collecting data to inform where to next. The data collected had one clear through-line throughout. Our staff were too helpful. They wanted so much for the students to succeed that they would do things like tell the student exactly what to write or prompt them too quickly after starting work. This has led to a planned series of learning across the remainder of the year where we work on how and why we fade support to try to foster independence. It will be challenging, it will be uncomfortable but to be truly supportive of students with additional needs we must do everything we can to build their capabilities as the world after school does not always offer the support these students may require.

Just this past week we had a staff professional development day about Responsive Teaching with Bron Ryrie Jones and originally the education support staff were going to be given administrative duties for the whole day. When this was flagged I quickly advocated for them to be involved in the day because not only are they deserving of high quality professional learning but knowing what great teaching looks like will also help them to better support our students. The day culminated with staff updating resources to have embedded checks for understanding and opportunities to respond and so while teachers completed this in their domains, we had our support staff pair up and create 5 minute lessons about any topic they were interested in with embedded CFUs which they then taught to the rest of the team. At the culmination of the day they were raving about how positive the impact the day was going to have on their practice.

Working in a secondary school offers some other interesting elements as to how we deploy and utilise education support staff. We have some periods during the year where the requirements for support are lower due to exams, work placements or the staggered release of students during term 4. During these times we try to increase the responsibility of our staff by helping with our Inclusion documentation as well as liaising with our feeder schools to sit in on Student Support Group meetings for students who will be coming to our school in the forthcoming year. These don’t sound the most attractive, but they can help to create a greater culture within the team that we’re all working towards our shared vision of achieving the greatest outcomes possible for these students.

As a final sneaky side point, look after and appreciate your education support staff. They are completing work which can be emotionally challenging, physically draining and for the most part thankless all while receiving a fraction of the income they deserve. If you treat them well not only will students with additional needs thrive4 but you will also have the best instructional spies in the school. Education support staff see everything! Having them as the eyes and ears to inform about what is actually happening in classrooms rather than just relying on what is documented is an incredibly underrated resource for schools.

So in summary, support your supports in not giving too much support to best support our students.

Note: there is a more complicated conversation about how inclusive inclusion is in mainstream schools when students are more than 18 months above or below level in a class as well as the challenge of meaningfully modifying and adjusting instruction to meet those students at their point of need, but that is a discussion for another time.

Additional note: yesterday it was announced that education staff in Victoria voted no to the in-principle VGSA agreement which is amazing from the perspective of supportive ES staff as the deal which was offered greatly undervalued their contributions and worth

Also referred to as Learning Support Officers, Teachers Aides, Teachers Assistants etc

My thoughts on this has been covered extensively in these past posts: