Ask most people what stops them applying for a teaching assistant job and they will say qualifications. No degree. GCSE maths from 1998. Nothing on paper since college. We read 541 UK teaching assistant adverts to see how often that is what the advert actually asks about. It is 8.9%.
The same adverts mention safeguarding in 73.9% of cases and a DBS check in 74.9%. So the thing being screened for is not what you learned. It is whether you are safe to put in a room with children.
What the adverts name
Reading all 541 for any named qualification, in order of how often it appears:
- Level 2 in 23.1%
- Level 3 in 13.1%
- GCSEs in 8.9%, and GCSE English or maths specifically in 7.6%
- A-levels in 5.4%
- NVQ in 4.6%
- A degree in 4.4%
- CACHE in 3.3%
And the number that matters more than any of them: 58.2% of the adverts name no specific qualification at all. Not a level, not a subject, not a grade.
Where a qualification does appear it is more often vocational than academic. Level 2 and Level 3 between them turn up far more than GCSEs, A-levels and degrees combined. The route being described is a college or workplace one, not a school-attainment one.
Being safe matters roughly eight times more than being qualified
Put the two side by side on the same 541 adverts. Safeguarding 73.9%, GCSEs 8.9%. A teaching assistant advert is about eight times more likely to raise child protection than to raise what you got at school.
That is not schools lowering a bar. It is schools screening for the thing that carries statutory weight. An unsuitable appointment is a safeguarding failure with a named person attached to it. A candidate whose maths GCSE is a grade lower than ideal is a training question.
We found the same shape when we read these adverts for what they ask for rather than what they pay. Safeguarding was the single most-mentioned attribute, and SEND experience came close behind, in our earlier read of 500 teaching assistant adverts.
The gap between what stops people and what is asked
This matters because the qualification worry is doing real damage at the point where someone decides whether to apply.
If 58.2% of adverts name no qualification, a candidate ruling themselves out on academic grounds is usually ruling themselves out of a competition that was never scored that way. The advert has told them what it wants, and it wants a DBS check and evidence they understand child protection.
The honest caveat is that an advert not saying is not the same as a school not asking. Plenty of trusts require GCSE English and maths at application, and it appears on the person specification rather than the advert. What we can say is that the advert, which is the thing a candidate reads before deciding, usually does not raise it.
If you are applying
Lead with safeguarding and with any experience of children who needed extra support, paid or not. That is what three quarters of these adverts are asking about.
If you hold a Level 2 or Level 3, name it in the exact form the advert uses, because those are the qualifications that actually appear. If you do not hold one, say you are willing to work towards it rather than leaving the space empty.
Do not lead with GCSEs. Fewer than one advert in ten asks, and the space is better spent on the thing that three in four do ask about.
Method
541 UK teaching assistant adverts saved from DWP Find a Job, parsed from the stored HTML. Find a Job has structured fields for salary, hours, contract type and location but no qualifications field, so every figure above comes from the advert's own body text.
Percentages are the share of all 541 adverts mentioning the term anywhere. Matching is case-sensitive for acronyms, which matters more than it sounds: a case-insensitive search for SEND also matches the ordinary verb in "send your CV to us", which is in a great many agency adverts.
Limits. One board, one snapshot, weighted towards agencies rather than schools advertising directly. Presence of a phrase is not the same as a requirement, and absence is not the same as no requirement. This describes what the adverts say, which is what a candidate sees, and not the hiring policy behind them. Our earlier read of a 500-advert extract of the same corpus put safeguarding at 79%; the 73.9% here is the same measure taken across all 541 saved pages.
Related: what these adverts pay and on what contract, in most advertised teaching assistant work is a day rate, not a salary.