Learn how to become a teaching assistant in this free online course that covers the relevant skills and school policies.

Aspiring teaching assistants (TAs) need to know the essential attributes they should possess to succeed in the classroom. This teaching training course compares the roles of TAs and learning support assistants and explores various ways in which you can contribute as a team member. We explain how schools operate and show you how to stay up to date with current teaching methods and contribute where you can.

A TA must follow certain school policies. We look at these subheadings of school policies: curriculum and teaching policies, health and safety, confidentiality, child protection, discipline, behavioural management, equal opportunities and related policies. The course explains how an assistant can support teaching and learning in the classroom by cultivating a calming presence, understanding the audience, posing questions and challenges, introducing or explaining a subject and encouraging active learning through intervention and non-intervention strategies. We show you how to decide which of these methods is the most useful for assisting individual students to learn, succeed, think and ask questions independently.

The course then goes through the curriculum that a teaching assistant needs to understand, including the formal curriculum and its counterpart used for children under the age of five, among others. We discuss how to advance your career and earning potential. The position of a TA is extremely important in today's educational system because of the UK’s shift to an inclusive model of education that supports the integration of students with a range of abilities into regular classrooms. Anyone working in the field of education needs to understand what an ‘inclusive classroom’ looks like as this process unfolds. This dynamic makes the TA’s job more crucial than ever. This teacher assistant training course is open to anyone interested in working in a support role in education. Sign up to learn how to enrich the learning experience and launch your educational career.