The number of teaching assistants working in UK schools has increased. Traditionally, the teaching assistant role has been seen to operate on the margins of staff hierarchies and power relations within schools. With the advent of workforce remodelling (Department for Education and Skills [DfES] 2003), and the continuation of a governmental lifelong learning agenda that encourages people to ‘earn and learn’, (Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE] / Department for Education and Employment [DfEE], 2000), teaching assistants are seemingly afforded more working autonomy and opportunity for career development than in the past. This paper presents aspects of a three year study that explored the personal and professional experiences of a group of teaching assistants, all female, who support teaching and learning in UK schools (Dunne et al, 2008). The teaching assistants were working and also studying for a Foundation degree in learning support at a university in the northwest of England. The researchers were interested in the teaching assistants’ perceptions of their role in school; their professional and personal experiences and career development. Questions that initially drove this longitudinal enquiry were: what are teaching assistants’ experiences and perceptions of themselves as professionals and how are they positioned in schools? This paper focuses on the discourses that were deployed by the teaching assistants during focus group interviews. It draws on Foucault’s notion of discourse as practice (Foucault, 1972) and power/knowledge to show how, as a group of educators, teaching assistants are invited, or interpellated, to operate within particular discourses that potentially constrain their position in schools.

Two focus group interviews were conducted; one group consisted of 6 primary school teaching assistants, and the other 6 secondary school teaching assistants. Over a three -year period, the groups were convened and invited to talk about their views on education and their experience of personal and professional change as a consequence of studying for a Foundation degree. The interviews were videoed, transcribed and then analysed using a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis approach (Graham, 2005)

Analysis of the interviews signified that the primary and secondary school teaching assistants appeared to operate within distinct discourses. The primary school teaching assistants operated, to some extent, within a discourse of care, whilst those from secondary schools appeared to operate within a discourse of instrumentalism that prioritised both their ‘usefulness’ in the classroom and ‘useful knowledge’. This paper concludes that the forms of discourse that circulate in schools potentially reinforce existing staff hierarchies and knowledge/power bases. It argues in particular that neo-liberal, utilitarian discourses and practices that potentially subjugate alternative meanings or understandings of ‘knowledge’, ‘education’ and the purpose of schooling need to be questioned and resisted.