Supporting Stories

Must be good with gerbils and computers' There are over 180,000 teaching assistants working in England. Originally tasked with routine, low-grade tasks, they are increasingly used today to stand in for teachers and their vital role is braided into policy thinking about raising standards and reducing teacher workloads. Supporting Stories investigates the lives and experiences of a small group of primary school TAs, in a compelling, inside-outside picture of classroom life. This unusual combination of ethnography and autoethnography stitches together stories of feelings and everyday lives and everyday politics in a carefully crafted collection which offers valuable insight and shared knowledge to TAs and would be TAs and to trainers, students on research methods courses, and everyone who would like to peek inside the primary school classroom.