Tag: In Your Setting

This activity is designed to allow you to explain the roles of different team members in your setting and get participants thinking about the importance of the LSA role in:

• creating positive learning environments and supporting learners to be able to do more on their own
• co-ordinating with other staff members to collectively address the needs of the young person.

Preparatory work [10 minutes]

Download and edit the In your setting handout to accurately reflect the specific roles and job titles in your setting.

Guidance

Ask the group to brainstorm all the different support roles in the college; collect their responses onto a flipchart / smartboard and add any that you think have been missed.

Ask the group to agree which roles should be discarded because while they were said to offer some support, e.g. careers adviser or teacher, it’s not their primary role or main part of their job. Again, add in any the group have missed.

Ask participants to split into pairs and allocate one of remaining support roles on your list to each pair (it is likely that the same role will be covered by more than one pair, depending on numbers).

Ask each pair to come up with a brief description of the type of support that role offers.

Ask each pair to feedback and respond to their suggestions confirming where they are accurate and addressing any misapprehensions.

Compare what the group says with the summary of job roles in the handout.

Reflect together on what is distinctive about the LSA role. Use the topic learning points to shape discussion.

Points to make: it’s about supporting their learning, not pastoral, not meeting personal care needs; mainly takes place in the classroom or other learning setting; critically it’s about supporting learners to develop independence in their learning and lives which is different from doing things for learners. Note if college model is that LSAs also do personal care, point out these are two distinct functions and these people should consider themselves dual professionals. Also point out that LSAs may be given other tasks within their job role (e.g. tidying classroom, lunchtime supervision) but these are in addition to their key function of supporting learning.

Key messages and debriefing

When you’re receiving ideas from your team during this activity, and giving final feedback, these key messages should be incorporated:

• an LSA is part of a team of staff who collectively meet the needs of the young person
• each staff member has one or more different primary functions (e.g. tutor to teach; support worker to meet personal care needs)
• primary function of the LSA is to support learners to access, engage and make progress in their learning and become increasingly independent learners
• LSAs do not simply ‘help’ learners or complete tasks for them
• there are different support roles in specialist FE settings, each providing different types of support; learning support (enabling access to and engagement with learning) is different from personal support (supporting personal care needs such as feeding, toileting).

You can also draw on the wider topic learning points in your summing up.