Where teaching assistant roles are actually advertised

You have applied for a dozen teaching assistant posts through Indeed and heard nothing. Maybe one automated acknowledgement. Meanwhile the school down the road has appointed someone, and you never saw the advert.

This is not usually a problem with you. Schools recruit through a fragmented set of channels that barely overlap, they screen against a written person specification rather than a CV, and a large share of TA posts are filled by someone the school already knows. Each of those is a mechanism you can work with once you can see it.

Most school vacancies never sit on one national board

There is no single place where school support staff jobs appear. Where an advert goes depends on who employs you, and that varies school by school.

If it is a maintained school (community, voluntary controlled, voluntary aided, foundation), the local authority is usually the employer or at least the HR provider. The vacancy goes on the council's own recruitment portal — Kent-Teach, WMJobs, Hampshire's jobs site, and so on for every authority in the country. Some councils run their own branded education job boards; some use shared platforms like Jobs Go Public or Eteach. These portals are where a lot of primary TA work lives, and a good number of them are poorly indexed by the aggregators.

If it is an academy, the employer is the trust. Single-academy trusts often just use their own website's vacancies page. Multi-academy trusts run a central careers site covering every school in the chain, and increasingly use an applicant tracking system (MyNewTerm, Face-Ed, Eteach and similar are all used in the sector). A trust with thirty schools may post fifty TA posts a year on one page that you will never find unless you go looking for it by name.

On top of that:

• Teaching Vacancies, the Department for Education's free listing service, carries school roles in England including support staff. Listing is free but not compulsory, so coverage is uneven — worth a saved search, not worth relying on.
• Tes remains the default for independent schools and for a lot of secondary and special school posts.
• Indeed and the aggregators do carry school vacancies, mostly scraped from trust systems or posted by agencies. They under-represent maintained schools badly.
• The school's own website. Small primaries in particular advertise on a "Vacancies" tab, send it to the parent mailing list, and put a notice on the gate. That is the whole campaign.

Outside England the structure is different in ways that matter:

• Scotland: the job title is usually pupil support assistant or classroom assistant, the employer is the council, and almost everything goes through myjobscotland. Disclosure is PVG scheme membership, not DBS.
• Wales: local authority sites and school sites, as in England. But learning support workers in schools must be registered with the Education Workforce Council — an employer will expect a registration number, and getting registered takes time you should not be spending after a job offer.
• Northern Ireland: classroom assistant recruitment is centralised through the Education Authority, including the substitute list that most people join first. AccessNI handles vetting.

If you want learning support work in further education, that is a separate market again — college roles are usually titled learning support assistant or learning support practitioner, and appear on college websites and the Association of Colleges jobs board more than on school channels.

The application form is the filter, and a CV is often an instant no

This is the single most common reason a competent TA gets no reply.

Schools recruit under safer recruitment rules set out in Keeping Children Safe in Education. That has concrete consequences. They need a full employment history with any gaps accounted for, self-disclosure of criminal record information handled in a particular way, and references — usually including your current or most recent employer, and usually sought before interview for shortlisted candidates. A CV does not give them any of that. So most schools ask for a completed application form and will not consider anything else. If you emailed a CV and a covering letter to a maintained school post, there is a reasonable chance nobody read it.

The second consequence is how shortlisting works. Schools shortlist against the person specification, frequently on a literal grid, marking each criterion as essential or desirable and scoring evidence for it. Your supporting statement is being read as a checklist answer, not as prose. If the person spec says "Level 3 qualification in supporting teaching and learning, or equivalent", "experience of delivering interventions under the direction of a teacher", "experience supporting pupils with an EHCP", and "knowledge of safeguarding procedures", those four things need to appear as four identifiable, evidenced claims. Name the interventions — Read Write Inc, Little Wandle, Numicon, Precision Teaching, ELSA, Lego Therapy, Talk Boost, whatever you have actually run. Name the settings: mainstream primary, resource base, special school, PRU. Say which key stages.

A supporting statement that is warm about how much you love working with children and silent on the person specification will not score.

Also: an enhanced DBS on the Update Service is a practical advantage, because it means the school can check you online rather than waiting weeks for a new certificate. Schools starting someone mid-term care about this more than they will say in the advert.

Agencies fill a specific slice, and it is not the slice you think

Supply and education agencies — Teaching Personnel, Protocol, Vision for Education, GSL, Academics, Prospero, Tradewind, the Hays and Reed education arms — dominate two things: day-to-day cover, and long-term one-to-one SEN placements that schools need filled quickly when funding lands.

Understand what an agency advert is. A lot of what you see on Indeed reading "SEN Teaching Assistant required, Birmingham, ASAP start, £85–£100 per day" is pipeline advertising: the agency is building a pool of registered, vetted candidates for work it expects to get, not filling one named post today. That is not dishonest, but if you apply expecting a specific job you will be confused by the response. Registering with two or three agencies that genuinely work your area is more efficient than applying to their adverts one at a time.

The things worth knowing before you commit:

• Agency Workers Regulations entitle you to equal basic pay and conditions with a directly employed comparator after twelve calendar weeks in the same role with the same hirer. The old "Swedish derogation" contracts that got around this were abolished in April 2020. Twelve weeks is a real threshold and it shapes how placements are structured.
• Many agencies pay through umbrella companies. Ask, before you accept, what your take-home actually is and what is deducted.
• Schools generally pay a transfer fee to take an agency TA onto their own payroll, or have to wait out a defined period. This is why a school that likes you may still not offer you a permanent post immediately. It is a commercial obstacle, not a judgement on you.
• Agency days are not paid in school holidays. Compare a daily rate against a term-time-only salary honestly, using the actual annual figure rather than the full-time-equivalent one the advert shows.

Agency work is also the most reliable way into a specific school. Long-term placements convert. That is a genuine route, not a consolation prize.

A lot of TA posts go to someone already in the building

Schools are small organisations with strong internal preference, and the safer recruitment burden makes a known, already-vetted person cheaper to appoint. The common internal ladders:

• Midday supervisor to TA. Lunchtime supervision is advertised more openly than TA work, is often the only vacancy a primary has in a given year, and puts you in the staffroom when the next TA post comes up.
• Volunteer or parent helper to TA, particularly in primaries. Volunteering in a school still requires DBS clearance, and once you have it you are a known quantity.
• Level 3 Teaching Assistant apprenticeship. Schools and trusts recruit apprentices directly; these appear on Find an Apprenticeship as well as on trust careers pages. Pay is low, but it is a funded route to the qualification while employed.
• TA to HLTA to cover supervisor. Higher Level Teaching Assistant status is assessed, not taught, and it changes which posts you are eligible for — particularly in secondaries, where cover supervisor roles are a distinct and better-paid grade.
• Local authority supply pools and trust banks. Many councils and trusts run a central bank of vetted casual staff for short-notice cover. Joining the bank is often a simpler process than applying for a post, and bank staff hear about substantive vacancies first.

None of this is "network more". It is that the cheapest hire for a school is someone already cleared, already known to the SENCo, and already able to start on Monday.

The calendar drives everything

Teaching assistant hiring is seasonal, but not on the same clock as teacher hiring.

Teachers are bound by statutory resignation dates — 31 May for a September start in most maintained schools. Support staff are not. TAs are typically on local government (NJC) terms with a notice period measured in weeks, often a month or a half-term. The practical effect: TA vacancies surface at much shorter notice than teaching posts and keep appearing all year.

Still, there are peaks:

• May to mid-July is the heaviest period for September starts, as schools finalise budgets and staffing structures for the new year and find out which posts they can afford.
• Late August and the first fortnight of September is a real second wave: people do not turn up, new pupils arrive with needs nobody anticipated, and schools scramble. Agencies are busiest here.
• November to December for January starts, plus maternity covers.
• Any time at all for one-to-one posts. When an EHCP is finalised and the local authority releases top-up funding for a named pupil, the school has to recruit immediately. These roles are usually fixed-term to the end of the academic year, frequently advertised with an ASAP start, and they are the largest single category of mid-year TA vacancy.

Two timing details worth acting on. First, school adverts often say "we reserve the right to close this vacancy early" or "interviews will be held as suitable applications are received", and schools mean it, because they are working against half-term deadlines. Apply on the day you see it, not on the closing date. Second, a school advertising in late June for September has an interview date already fixed, usually within two weeks of closing, and will want your current employer's reference before that date. If you are currently employed, have your referee details ready and expect them to be contacted early.

What to do this week

1. Identify your employers, not just your jobs. List every local authority within travelling distance and bookmark each one's recruitment portal. Then list every multi-academy trust operating schools near you — the trust name is on each school's website footer — and bookmark each trust's careers page. That list of twenty or thirty URLs is your actual job board.
2. Set up saved searches with email alerts on Teaching Vacancies, Tes and Eteach, filtered to support staff rather than teaching posts, so you stop relying on the aggregators.
3. Get an enhanced DBS on the Update Service if you do not have one. In Scotland, PVG. In Wales, EWC registration.
4. Build one master application document containing your full employment history with dates and reasons for any gaps, two referees including your most recent employer, your qualifications with awarding bodies, and a paragraph of evidence for each of the dozen criteria that keep recurring on person specs. Then each application is an editing job rather than a writing job.
5. Register with two or three agencies that actually place in your area, and say plainly that you are looking for long-term placements with a view to permanent.
6. If a specific school is where you want to be, look at whether it is advertising anything at all — midday supervision, after-school club, exam invigilation, the bank.

One structural difficulty remains after all of that: the adverts are spread across dozens of separate systems and each one wants a form answering its own person specification. jobmarket.pro is an agent that searches across those sources, reads each advert in full, tells you where you meet the specification and where you do not, and drafts the application from a single profile of your real experience.