Meet Luke Weston:

Luke Weston is a teaching assistant at Manor Fields Primary school. He completed his Level 3 Teaching Assistant Apprenticeship with a PE, Health and Wellbeing focus and is currently doing the Level 5 Teaching Assistant Apprenticeship on the SEND pathway and working towards his HLTA qualification. 

Luke: I left school when I was sixteen. Sport has always been my thing but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what I wanted to do. I saw an advert for a sports apprentice at a local infant school and decided to apply. I thought I’d give it a go for a year then maybe go to college, to do a sports BTEC but I ended up enjoying it so much. After that I applied for a role at Manor Fields Primary and they offered to support me as a Level 3 teaching assistant apprenticeship, with a PE focus.

Luke: Initially, I thought I only wanted to focus on sports, but I’ve realised that I really enjoy classroom support as well and that side of teaching. I have dyslexia and struggled at school. I thought if I can help other children who struggled, both inside and outside of class, then that would be a massive achievement for me. 

Training to be a TA and doing the Level 3 Teaching Assistant apprenticeship is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done. I get an incredible sense of reward seeing the children progress in the classroom and helping them with core skills, but I still get to be involved in PE and sports.

When I left school if you said to me when I was in year 10 that I’d be working in a school I’d have probably said - no way! Now several years down the track I’ve been a TA across most classes and Key Stages and have had some incredible experiences here at Manor Fields. I feel like I’ve fallen on my feet and I really like the variety in my role.

Luke: We have breakfast clubs every morning and I lead some of the sports ones. We have a huge variety from dodgeball, gymnastics, football, multisports, hockey, rounders, the list goes on…and then on Fridays we do board games.

Afterwards I welcome the children who haven’t been at a club into school. Some days the teacher will be leading small group interventions and on those days I might take the register and oversee the work the teacher has set the whole class then get them ready for assembly.

Around 9.30/10am I take a small group for a Maths intervention with pupils with SEND, quite often involving active learning. There are small groups of pupils who follow an alternative curriculum until they can go back into the main class. Afterwards, I’ll continue to do general classroom TA support in the mornings. In the afternoons I’m teaching PE with another TA and then when school finishes I take sports-focused enrichment clubs.

Luke: When the weather is nice we go outside and throw the ball while doing our number bonds, counting in twos, fives and tens and simple addition/subtraction. We draw number lines in chalk and jump along them.

I have numbers made out of felt that I muddle up and they have to place on the line and we play games with giant dice and moving into spaces. It’s just a much more visual and tangible way of learning. I’ll evidence this by photographing the pupils’ work so the teacher knows exactly where each child is up to. I also support with active phonics when possible.

Luke: It definitely helps with their sense of belonging and their ability to achieve at school outside of the classroom. There’s one lad, for example, who is in my maths intervention group whose self-esteem had taken a bit of a knock and there were a few behavioural challenges. He’s recently got a place on the football team and giving him that chance to thrive on the team has really had a positive effect.

Since starting football he seems a lot happier in school generally. His relationships with his peers have really improved, he’s made more friends and he’s always asking me when the next match is going to be.

I was probably the last generation to go outside and kick a ball around after school - now children are spending a lot more time indoors on their phones or gaming. If we can give them an extra hour of activity and in-person connection it’s worth it.

Luke: Yes I would say so. Leading PE allows me to get to know the children in different ways. There are some children who are very quiet in class but find themselves in a particular sport. You get to see a different side of the children when we get outside, and you see different children thriving in different sports, so variety is really important. 

Luke: My confidence has grown massively. I’ve learned lots of different teaching techniques from being on the apprenticeship courses and in particular about removing barriers to learning on the Level 5. The Level 3 Teaching Assistant course enabled me to become a well-rounded TA and develop my PE skills, but when I first heard about the Level 5 apprenticeship I just knew I wanted to progress. 

I wanted to gain more responsibility, to have the confidence to take a whole class for subjects other than PE, to provide cover for the teachers and take on more of a lead role in interventions. Everything that I’ve learned so far on the apprenticeship has definitely given me the confidence to do this - it’s hugely helped.

So this Friday, for example, I'm teaching a maths lesson and a couple years ago I probably would've thought, I don’t know if I'm confident enough to do that!

I’m maybe thinking about going into teaching but wasn’t quite ready to go straight into it from Level 3. The Level 5 has broadened my horizons and offers me a stepping stone so I can see where it takes me!

Luke: Again, I think it comes down to having the confidence to put my knowledge into practice and break down barriers to learning. There’s one girl who was in my maths intervention group and she desperately wanted to get back into the mainstream class with her friends.

She’s now in the mainstream class for half the maths lesson which is a massive achievement for her. It shows the interventions we’ve been doing as a team and things I’ve learned on the course have had a positive effect.

Luke: I’ve learned a lot from the workshops that I’ve been able to directly put into practice - trying things out as you go is a real benefit of doing an apprenticeship. My mentor and I will meet and discuss things to try, sometimes it works and sometimes that group of children or that individual will respond better to something else.

Tutor support has also been great. The ESF Apprenticeship tutors on my Level 3, Level 5 (and now my Level 5 Specialist Teaching Assistant programme) cannot do enough for you. Sometimes it’s just a matter of someone talking through their suggested comments on assignments over an extra Zoom session, but it’s so helpful.

It’s also really useful to share ideas with other TAs on the courses. Just being able to listen to what other people say and what they're doing in their settings is great. You never feel like you are on your own.

If anyone is thinking about doing an apprenticeship, I’d advise them to give it a go. You see education from a totally different side - it’s really not just writing things down in textbooks! The apprenticeship courses, especially the Level 5, have broadened my horizons and helped me understand the perspective of SEND children.

Luke: When I was in primary school, it was all women - there were no male role models in school really. We are lucky as we have four men at Manor Fields, but not all primary schools I’ve worked in have been like that. 

Sometimes it’s less about gender, per say, and more about the experiences you can share. For example, the boys will come up to me after the weekend and tell me how they’ve got on in their weekend matches and whether they scored. It’s almost like they can share what they’ve done outside of school and bring that into school and that’s something they can be proud of. They know I coach football outside of school as well, so I get it - they want to share achievements with someone who has that same passion and just feel seen.

Luke: If a child says to me, I can't do this because I'm dyslexic, I tell them that it doesn’t mean they can’t achieve their goal and that there are many ways to get to where they want to be in life. Look at me - I am dyslexic and I have made a career out of working in a school and helping others. 

Just because you've got this label, it doesn't mean that you can’t still go out and do whatever you want to do.