Limitations of the study and future research directions 115

Sample; as with many of the other studies that have investigated TA facilitation of peer interactions, this study had a small sample size of seven TAs from two primary schools at phase one and three TAs at phase two. All of the

participants were women of different ages, broadly reflecting the large demographic proportion of female TAs (DfE, 2016a). Due to the size,

representativeness and the geographical location of the sample in a particular area of outer London, the generalisability of findings from this study are clearly limited. Furthermore, the seven TAs in the study chose to participate, meaning that their interest and willingness to reflect on their role may not represent the views and behaviour of other TAs (Feldman & Matos, 2013). However, this small-scale exploratory study’s aim was not to produce quantifiable significant results or to widely generalise findings. Its aim was instead to increase

understanding of the TA role, in particular their support of peer interactions on the playground, to contribute to the limited research base available and to provide some examples of good practice with the intention of stimulating future research in this area.

Furthermore the findings section presenting the observation data and

subsequent discussions around research question two were inevitably shorter than the interview findings section. This was because observations focussed on the specific nature of TA support within a particular context whereas the interviews focussed on TAs role more generally with a particular interest in their role on the playground. Future research comparing interview and observation data of a larger sample of TAs with a higher number of observations per TA over a longer period would provide more opportunity for comparison within and between TAs. Furthermore, only TAs assigned to a child 1:1 were observed when the interview data also included class TAs. Future research could compare similarities and differences in the support of non-academic areas of children’s development between different TA positions.

Measures; although this study explored the perceptions of TAs on their role as well as the nature of TA interactions with children on the playground,

information about their actual impact on children’s peer interactions was not gathered. This is because the aim of this study was to first gather information

about what TAs actually broadly do in their role on the playground before making any assumptions about their impact.

Furthermore, information on the proximity of TAs was gathered via informal field notes which did not allow for any detailed analysis that could lead to accurate comparison between TAs. Future research could therefore further explore TA proximity as well as the impact of TA involvement on peer interactions.

Due to the sample size, particularly of the observation data, it was difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions about the impact of children’s developmental level or the nature of SEND on who or how TAs support. Further research exploring and comparing different age ranges as well categories of SEND is needed to shed light on this.

In line with the current study’s findings, there also needs to be more of a focus in future research on how TAs interact with children more generally rather than in response to particular children, as has often been the primary focus of

previous research. Findings from this study clearly conflicted with prior research (Feldman & Matos, 2013: Baxter, 2014; Dolva et al. 2011) in that 1:1 support wasn’t the only role of the TA assigned to an individual child in every school context. These new findings are likely to have come out as a result of the particular context being studied, as previous research has tended to focus on classroom contexts.

Therefore, as well as research further exploring the positive and distinct role of TAs in the playground context, future research could also explore and compare TA support in other contexts that haven’t yet been explored such as during transitions, school trips and PE.

Another limitation of the present study was that video-recorded data was not gathered. Given the unexpected finding that TAs demonstrated attunement in their interactions with children in this study, detailed information on TAs non- verbal communication may have added further weight to this. Research highlights the importance of non-verbal communication for successful attunement (Kennedy, 2011). This includes body language (posture, body movements and gestures), facial expression, and also how language is used

including tone, intensity, inflection, spacing of words, emphases, pauses, silences and fluency (Egan, 1994). Although some of this information was collected via field notes which did add context regarding body language and TA positioning in the playground, further research could explore in more detail the frequency of different types of TA-child interaction during unstructured times including non-verbal interactions.

Additionally research comparing TAs’ and teachers’ approaches to the support of peer interactions and also their quality of relationships with children could shed further light on the perceived differences between their roles that TAs in this study highlighted. This might confirm or contradict TAs’ perceptions in this study that this is something that they do far more of and would give findings a comparative rather than just descriptive element.

Although the findings of this study suggested that line managers did not tend to get involved in how TAs carry out their day-to-day role including their support of children in the playground, the views and opinions of line managers themselves were not sought. Future research should be carried out to investigate line manager’s views on TA deployment in this context as well as their views on the opportunities and challenges for naturalistic interventions in comparison to more structured approaches. This would be valuable because previous research has suggested that schools tend to be reluctant to use naturalistic interventions due to perceived issues with implementation and monitoring (Baxter, 2015).

For the same reasons, future research should seek out pupil views regarding TA support, particularly as this is an area where there has also been little exploration (Giangreco et al., 2010). This could explore children and young people’s views about the TA role in different contexts and the factors perceived to be influencing the effectiveness of their practice.

5.7 Implications for practice