The paper focuses on the formal and informal aspects of the student assistant role in German schools. In the past years an exponential increase in student assistants at mainstream schools as well as special schools could be observed (cf. Lübeck & Demmer 2022, 13). Historically, the role of student assistants in Germany has emerged from the independent living movement and their demand for more self-determined help and support. In the school context, student assistants were initially employed in special schools and then extended to mainstream schools, as personal assistance for students with disabilities. The increase of student assistants is thereby connected to the flexibilization of special educational measures and deinstitutionalization of special schooling in reaction to the UNCRPD. While in Germany’s federalist education system, the organization of schools is subject to state-specific rules, student assistants are a measure from the area of social legislation and thus from federal legislation. It is organized by different entities in different federal states and financed by the municipalities, health insurers, or both (Demmer and Lübeck 2022). However, in all federal states, it takes the form of individual support within the framework of integration assistance. Existing analyses made clear that there is a massive lack of clarity in Germany on student assistants’ job profile and authority relationships (Heinrich 2016). In most federal states, the ministries or relevant associations have established catalogues of permitted activities, which vary in their degree of concreteness. Moreover, these job descriptions typically refer to practical, everyday physical and psychosocial care. However, studies show that student assistants often take on pedagogical and instructional tasks in practice, despite not being officially authorized to do so (Ehrenberg & Langenhoff, 2025). Thus, the strict separation between pedagogical and care-related support is not sustainable in practice. Instead, student assistants’ practices can be described as diffuse, as they take on variable positions and functions in classroom instruction and often serve as a link between different groups (Blasse 2017). Based on the CoFTA framework and referring to our qualitative empirical data and official documents we will discuss in our paper the tensions TAs are exposed to in relation to differing formal and informal roles and also the policies that have shaped those roles.

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