Introduction As inclusive education is receiving more and more attention in the global south countries and that more TAs are hired due to the increasing SEN students enrolled in the general classrooms [1], research on TAs and especially on defining their roles and cooperation with teachers and parents is still rare [2]. In China, TAs are generally known as resource-room-teachers (RRTs) and shadow teachers (STs), with the former being employed by the schools and the latter by parents of children with various disabilities (especially with social and emotional challenges). Most RRT are classroom teachers and some being special educators allocated from neighbouring special schools [3]. STs have a more diverse composition including university students and social enterprise employees with education and psychology background, as well as parents of children with disabilities [4]. Most TAs are predominantly female, working part-time, with no formal entry qualifications or training required. Methodology Decentralised data collection further problematizes systemic updates of TAs and so far, there are no national guidelines defining TAs’ formal and informal roles. Therefore, guided by the CoFTA, I am applying a qualitative case study design to examine Shanghai TAs’ roles undertaken in schools, as a first step to address this issue. Key findings TAs’ pedagogical and non-pedagogical roles were identified. Based on the three-way framework conceptualising TAs’ pedagogical role into support, repair and heuristic [5], we further identified the support and repair roles. For the support role, TAs regularly use direction maintenance, recruitment, contingency management/frustration control. For the repair role that relates to their interaction when children experience difficulty in their learning, teachers use withholding correction (encouraging pupils to problem-solve themselves), effective questioning, modelling and showing awareness of children’s zone of proximal development. TAs assume non-pedagogical roles on an informal basis, which can be classified into six dimensions: caregiver, behaviour manager, facilitator of peer and child-teacher relations, discipline-keeper, administrative roles and bridge between schools and families, among which behaviour manager and family liaison were mostly recognized. Conclusions While assuming both pedagogical and non-pedagogical roles in the classroom, Chinese TAs find it difficult to clarify what their specific roles are, which leads to some of the challenges to collaborate with teachers and families. Meanwhile, considering that many chinese schools can reject a child with disabilities citing various reasons, to have TAs sometimes is the only ticket a child can get to a general school, government policy clearly defining TAs’ roles should emerge.

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