The topic of school assistance has received increasing attention in German educational policy and educational science contexts since the obligation of an inclusive school system was legally anchored in Germany by the UN-CRPD in 2009. Thereby the function of inclusion support for students with special educational needs to participate in school is linked to the expectation of bridging the gap between individual needs and the school’s ability to support them (cf. Laubner et al., 2022, p. 7). According to Dworschak (2010), school assistants mainly accompany one student who needs individual support inside and outside of class due to special needs in the context of learning, behaviour, communication, medical care and/or coping with everyday life. As a systemic measure, school assistance is discussed in terms of its effect on inclusive education, especially with regard to the various facets of stabilizing or irritating practices, orientations and processes that accompany it (cf. Blasse et al., 2021, p. 189).

By bringing school assistants into the classroom, two professional groups coexist being responsible for student learning. At the same time, the practice of school assistants is subject to different conditions and normative expectations than those of teachers. The diversity among the topic of school assistance and individual learning support can be related to several aspects: the diversity of political and structural requirements depending on federal states and local authority, the diversity of the people working as school assistants concerning their profession and qualification, the diversity of their job and role(s) in school and in class, and finally the diversity of the students they support. While school assistance appears to be one of the younger yet a rather complex field of research, the arrangement of individual learning support in inclusive educational settings has long been a subject in German research on school pedagogy and didactics (cf. Hackbarth & Martens 2018) as well as in international discourses on adaptive education (cf. Wang 1992) .

The paper presentation will focus on the perspectives of school assistants on individual learning support by taking into account the tensions they face when dealing with self and external expectations. On the one hand, school assistants are not allowed to ‘teach’ students – on the other hand, they work more closely with individual students than any other professional group in the classroom. That leads to the main question of the paper presentation: To what extent do school assistants take responsibility for learning and how are these teaching-learning-processes structured? In this regard we are interested in the following aspects: How do school assistants negotiate the artificial separation of teaching and additional support? What are the perspectives of school assistants on subject-related professional learning? Which individual learning needs do school assistants identify, how do they describe them, and how do they meet them didactically? Considering that we will focus on the value of diverse perspectives on children’s needs as well as the risk of the exclusionary effect on children that might become evident due to fixed one-to-one learning support and other practices.

To explore the perspectives of school assistants on individual learning support, we are choosing a qualitative research approach by analysing group discussions and further natural as well as initiated conversations between school assistants using the documentary method (Bohnsack, 2017). Based on Karl Mannheim’s (1952) sociology of knowledge, the method offers the opportunity to reconstruct people’s explicit (theoretical) as well as implicit (atheoretical) knowledge by focusing their interactions and ways of speaking. Dealing with the complexity of diverse learning and teaching contexts in particular, the documentary method enables to face tensions that underly people’s expectations and experiences in the research field. The paper presentation is based on empirical data from a PhD project on the inter-organisational professionalisation of school assistants. The specificity of the profession of school assistants lies in its location in two social organisations: while they carry out their professional practice in school, in most cases their employment and funding is done through external agencies. The project considers the associated inherent logics of social pedagogy and school pedagogy and how they are related. In order to do justice to the complexity and difference of professional structures and working conditions, data is collected in both organisations: one agency and two contrasting schools. In one of the two schools, we conducted 4 group discussions with school assistants (initiated by the researcher, duration from 50 to 85 minutes) and 11 audio-recordings of “natural” conversations (initiated by the school and/or the agency, e.g. staff meetings, group interactions, or collegial cas consultation) so far. The data collection in the second school and at the agency is planned for spring and summer.

The data analysis offers insights into the way school assistants deal with tensions regarding the adoption and development of didactics, taking into account the ambivalent situation of being responsible for learning and not being entitled to evaluate the students at the same time. When it comes to individual learning support, the assistants mention a lack of equality in relation to the teachers. In terms of the responsibility for learning, school assistants show individual competence in the sense of advocacy responsibility for students. In addition, they self-identify as professionals who have a diagnostic eye on students through distanced observations and close interaction at the same time, especially when it comes to social learning. However, this self-attribution seems to be expressed in a subject-differentiated manner; for example, in selected subject-didactic questions, they demand targeted management and responsibility by the teachers in the form of provision of materials and individual learning plans. School assistants see in particular the need for regular one-to-one learning situations by teachers in order to identify developmental levels and to counteract estrangement between teachers and students with special educational needs. Overall, the data point to the tendency to an orientation towards equality and shared responsibility for all students. With view to the core interest of the research project, it can be discussed to what extent responsibility for learning is an opportunity for the professionalisation of school assistants. The data collected so far show that responsibility for learning is closely linked to self expectations as well as external expectations in relation to one’s own professional image. Comparing different schools should give an answer to the question of how differently or similarly the professional image is negotiated and to what extent the schools can be reconstructed as a professional space of experience for the school assistants.

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