The participants indicated there were tasks they ‘never’ performed or the task was “not applicable” (NA) to their
role as a TA. The figures in the frequency section of Table 1 represents the total of the “never” and the NA tasks.
In total there were 9 tasks that the majority of participants indicated “never” and NA; see Table 1 for item-level
data. The participants may have responded “never” or “Not Applicable” to the these activities because they are
not currently performing these tasks with the students they support, which means they may have, or could, perform these tasks depending on the needs of the students. Similarly the participants may have responded
“never” because the activity has not currently been allocated to them or because of the different expectations of
the schools they currently work in.
In the open-ended section of item 23 of the questionnaire, the participants were asked to indicate any other
activities they undertook in their role as TAs. They were also asked to indicate how often they undertook these
activities. Forty nine of the 163 participants (30%) responded to this section of the questionnaire. Twenty-nine of
the 49 participants (59%) noted that they photocopied teachers’ work regularly although the frequency varied.
Six participants noted that they undertook administration work, for example, TA136 wrote: “office reception
daily” and TA114 wrote: “supervise the Silent Planning Room (2 periods per week), accompany on excursion
weekly with my PE class, assist in the administration area perhaps 2-3 times per week”.