Leanne is a teacher aide, employed at two country schools in SE Queensland. Her story illustrates the many and varied roles teacher aides perform around the country. It also highlights some of the amazing life experiences of paraprofessional staff that contribute to the rich learning environments of our schools.

Recently, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) trialled seven TA led literacy and numeracy intervention programs, with a 100% success rate. Rob Webster, from the UCL Institute of Education, whose research has focused on the impact of teaching assistants, said that ‘a 100% success rate, over seven trials, is almost unheard of, and there is something unignorable about the impact of teacher aides.’

For many older children and adolescents who struggle with reading, making sense of the words on a page is not an automatic process, and can be painstakingly slow and laboured, resulting in the reader getting little meaning and certainly no satisfaction from what they read.