How to write a teaching assistant CV that gets read

You have sent applications to every school within a sensible drive, you have the Level 3, you have years in classrooms, and the replies have not come. Or they came as a line saying the post was filled internally. This is normal and it is not usually about you being underqualified. It is usually about what the shortlister could see in the twenty seconds they gave your paperwork, and about a quirk of how schools recruit that almost no general CV advice mentions.

First, check where your CV is actually going

School recruitment splits into two routes, and they need different documents.

Direct to a school or trust. Most schools ask for their own application form. Safer recruitment guidance in Keeping Children Safe in Education pushes schools towards a full, self-declared employment history with gaps accounted for, which a CV does not reliably give them, so many adverts say plainly that CVs alone will not be considered. If you have been emailing a CV to school office addresses and hearing nothing, that alone may be the reason. Download the pack, fill in the form, and write the supporting statement.

On that route, the supporting statement is where the decision is made, not the CV. Shortlisting panels in schools commonly score candidates against the person specification — the grid of essential and desirable criteria at the back of the pack. If the essential column says "experience of supporting pupils with autism in a mainstream setting" and your statement does not contain a paragraph that obviously answers that, a scoring panel has nothing to award a mark to, even if the experience is buried in your CV.

Agency and supply. Here the CV does the work, and it is a different document: key stages you will cover, subjects if secondary, availability by day, how far you will travel, DBS on the update service or not, and whether you will take behaviour-heavy placements. A consultant is matching you to a call from a school that needs someone by Thursday.

Write both. They are not the same CV with the margins adjusted.

What the person reading it looks for first

It is worth knowing who is reading. For a mainstream primary TA post it is often the headteacher or deputy, sometimes with the SENCO. For a one-to-one or SEN support post it is almost always the SENCO. In a special school it may be a class teacher or phase lead. In a secondary it might be the SENCO or a faculty lead for a subject-attached role. In a large trust the office may sift for basic eligibility first.

What they scan for, roughly in this order:

• Age range and key stage. "Teaching assistant, five years" tells them nothing. KS1 and Year 10 are different jobs. Put the key stage and year groups in the role line itself: Teaching Assistant (KS1, Years 1–2), SEN Learning Support Assistant (KS3/4, Maths and Science).
• Type of need, named. Not "supported children with SEN". ASC, ADHD, SEMH, MLD, SLD, PMLD, speech, language and communication needs, hearing impairment, physical disability, EAL. A SENCO recruiting a one-to-one for a non-verbal pupil with a gastrostomy is looking for something quite specific.
• Phonics scheme, if primary. Schools are tied to a validated programme and want someone who can deliver it from day one. Name it: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, Read Write Inc, Sounds-Write, Essential Letters and Sounds. Say which part you deliver — keep-up sessions, catch-up, 1:1 tutoring, group reading practice.
• Behaviour training. Team Teach, CPI's MAPA, Norfolk Steps or the local equivalent. For SEMH and special school posts this is often close to a gating criterion.
• Availability and DBS. Start date, notice period, and whether your enhanced DBS with barred list check is on the update service.

If those five things are not visible in the first third of the first page, the reader is doing archaeology, and mostly they do not.

Qualifications: which ones the advert means

The titles in this field are a mess and it is worth writing yours out precisely rather than saying "Level 3 qualified".

• Level 2 / Level 3 Supporting Teaching and Learning in Schools — the long-standing certificates and diplomas, awarded by CACHE/NCFE, Pearson, City & Guilds and others. Write the level, the full title and the awarding body.
• Level 3 Teaching Assistant apprenticeship standard — different route, same broad level. Say if that is what you did, and say where it was completed.
• Level 3 Diploma for the Early Years Workforce / Early Years Educator — if you came from nursery or childcare. This is the one that matters for EYFS and Reception posts, and it is worth flagging that it carries the early years ratio status.
• HLTA status — assessed against the HLTA professional standards rather than taught as a course. If you hold it, put it near the top and say whether you cover classes, and for how long at a stretch.
• GCSE English and maths at grade 4/C or above, or equivalents. Many adverts list this as essential and shortlisters check it. If you have Functional Skills Level 2, say that and say Level 2.

Then the training that is smaller but often decisive: paediatric first aid (say whether it is the 12-hour), Makaton (which stage), BSL (which level), Elklan, ELSA, Thrive practitioner, Forest School Level 3, epilepsy awareness with rescue medication, anaphylaxis and adrenaline auto-injector, moving and handling, hoist training, gastrostomy or PEG feeding, intimate care, safeguarding level and Prevent. Date them. Schools care whether the training is current.

Evidence: name the programme, not the skill

The biggest single difference between a TA CV that gets a call and one that does not is specificity about interventions. "Delivered interventions to small groups" could be written by anyone. A SENCO reading it learns nothing and cannot picture you in their provision map.

Write what you actually ran. Numicon, Plus 1 and Power of 2, 1stClass@Number, Success@Arithmetic, Nuffield Early Language Intervention, Talk Boost, Colourful Semantics, Precision Teaching, Lexia, Fresh Start, Toe by Toe, Rapid Reading, Attention Attention Autism, Zones of Regulation, Lego Therapy, Drawing and Talking, sensory circuits, Intensive Interaction, PECS and which phase, now-and-next boards and visual timetables, TEACCH workstations.

Then add the shape of it, because a group of three twice a week is not the same job as a caseload. "Ran daily 20-minute Little Wandle keep-up sessions with groups of four in Year 1" is a sentence a shortlister can act on. "Held a caseload of six KS3 pupils for weekly ELSA sessions" is another.

If you have outcome evidence that you genuinely hold — reading ages you tracked, phonics screening pass rates for your group, B Squared or Evidence for Learning steps, Boxall Profile movement — use it and say where it came from. If you do not have it, do not manufacture a percentage. Describe the work instead. Invented gains are easy to unpick at interview by anyone who has run the same programme.

The things TAs leave out almost every time

This is the part worth going back over your draft for. In no particular order, the experience that TAs routinely have and routinely omit:

• Exam access arrangements. Working as a reader, scribe, practical assistant or prompt under JCQ regulations, and invigilation. Secondary SENCOs need this every year and struggle to staff it.
• Contributions to EHCP paperwork. Gathering evidence for an EHC needs assessment, writing the support-assistant contribution to an annual review, attending the review itself, attending TAC or TAF meetings.
• Carrying out programmes set by therapists. Speech and language targets from a SALT, fine and gross motor programmes from an OT, physio programmes, standing frame and hoist use, AAC devices and eye-gaze. Say you deliver them and that you record and feed back.
• Systems you can already use. CPOMS or MyConcern for safeguarding logging, Tapestry or Seesaw or Evidence for Learning, B Squared, Edukey Provision Map, SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom. A school migrating nobody onto a new system is a school that rings you sooner.
• Adapting the teacher's resources. Pre-teaching vocabulary, making the differentiated version, transcribing, scaffolding writing, producing symbol-supported text. TAs describe this as "supporting the teacher". It is a distinct skill and it is what a class teacher most wants to hear.
• The other hats. Cover supervision, midday supervision, breakfast and after-school club, running a lunchtime club, first aider on rota, playground behaviour lead, school trips and residentials, minibus with D1 or MiDAS. Many TAs hold three roles at one school and list one.
• Languages spoken, if the school has an EAL intake. Say the language and the fluency.
• Intimate and personal care, plainly stated. For special school and PMLD posts it is essential criteria and candidates leave it off out of awkwardness.

Format, briefly

Two pages. Current or most recent role first, with school name, phase (infant, junior, primary, secondary, special, PRU or alternative provision, independent), roughly how large, and your key stage. Continuous dates, month and year, with any gap explained in one line — schools will ask about gaps regardless, and pre-empting it removes a friction point at shortlisting. References from your most recent school including the headteacher; schools often request them before interview, so tell your head you are looking before they receive a request cold.

If you are moving from parent volunteer or childminding into a first paid TA post, say so directly and describe the classroom hours you have actually done, in which year group, doing what. The route is well understood and does not need dressing up.

What to do this week

Pick the three live adverts you most want. For each, open the person specification and put the essential criteria in a column. Against each one, write the specific thing you have done — the named scheme, the year group, the need, the training certificate and its date. Where the column is empty, note it; that is either a training request to make in your current post, or a reason to apply anyway and say in the statement how you would get there.

Then rebuild the top third of your CV so the key stage, the needs you have supported, the phonics or numeracy programmes you deliver, your behaviour training and your DBS status are all visible without scrolling. Everything else on the page is secondary to those.

If the work of reading each pack properly and matching your evidence to it is what has been stopping you applying, jobmarket.pro reads each advert in full and prepares the application from a single profile of your real experience.