168 pages
228mm x 145mm
ISBN-10: 1 85856 250 3
ISBN-13: 978 185856 250 6
Published October 2001

Learning Support Assistants are taking an increasingly pivotal role in the classroom, yet their voices have remained unheard. This is the first book in which they talk about their work in different contexts and settings. The Learning Support Assistants who write here come from a range of educational and experiential backgrounds and work across a wide spectrum of schools, including one for children with emotional and behaviourial difficulties and one for children with special educational needs.

The book will raise the profile of Learning Support Assistants and validate their voices. It features vibrant personal accounts of their experience. They describe their work with enthusiasm but also objectivity, and reveal that the rewards of the job are essentially the children and their progress. As one observes about working in a special school: '...the personality of the child comes to the fore, and these special needs children become special children who happen to need different things'.

By developing points of practice from the grounded experience of these committed and able but poorly paid and often low-status classroom workers, the book provides a resource for their training and development. It also offersmodels to schools of how best to value, support and develop their work.

Untold Stories is for Learning Support Assistants, for their trainers and mentors, and for the management teams of schools who employ Learning Support Assistants to support children in their classrooms.

Tim O'Brien lectures in Psychology, Learning and Development at Institute of Education University of London.

Philip Garner is Professor of Special Education at Nottingham Trent University and author of Pupils with Problems.