The development of the role of Teaching Assistant (TA) in English schools is part of a large scale remodeling of the school workforce, intended as part of the policy ostensibly to ease teachers’ workload and improve their work/life balance.  To this end the workforce in schools has expanded exponentially over the past 10 years with the biggest rise apparent in the number of TAs which has more than trebled over this period.  This paper considers whether teaching assistants who work alongside teachers, particularly in inner-city urban schools, may offer a vital but unexamined resource in terms of connecting schools and teachers with parents and the wider community.  Hargreaves (2001) suggests that some teachers are physically, socially and culturally removed from the communities in which they teach resulting in a social divide between teachers, parents and pupils which impacts on the cultural construction of normative behaviour within the classroom.  Hargreaves describes this concept as “emotional geography” which attempts to look at the distance both physical and psychological between a teacher’s own lived experience, values and beliefs and the school community within which they are teaching.  Levin & Riffel (1997) describe how mis-interpretation of the socio-cultural context of pupils and parents actions and situations can mean that teachers make assumptions and have expectations which are not valid.  In this situation a void opens up between parents and teachers which it is very difficult to negotiate, indeed teachers may not want to cross this divide.  Conversely, TAs have traditionally been drawn from the communities within which they live and are often parents of pupils in the school, particularly at the primary level. Their “emotional geography” may be very much rooted in the school and the community and can offer a vital resource to schools in terms of connecting the two.  How TAs negotiate this conflation of the public and private sphere is examined drawing on Reay’s (2000) work on emotional capital and Hothchild’s (1983) theory of emotional labour.   The key questions for the research are:

• Do recruiting practices for TAs acknowledge the emotional geography of this section of the workforce?
• How do TAs experience their role as link between community and school?
• Are there CPD opportunities for educational leaders to overtly explore the socio-cultural context of their schools and utilize the tacit knowledge of TAs in this respect to connect the two?

 The purpose of bringing this to a European audience is to explore if this situation is a purely English phenomenon or whether there is resonance in other countries and practice which can be drawn upon. 

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