Advocacy · Research + Lived Experience

The One-to-One Crisis: Why the Most Important Adult in Your Child's Day Has the Least Job Security

The relationship your child depends on most is, structurally, one of the least secure jobs in the building. Here's the data behind why — and what you can actually do about it.

By Samson Joseph, Founder of Fill My Form Direct · 8 min read

Ask a parent of a SEND child which single relationship matters most to their child's school day, and most won't say the headteacher, or even the class teacher. They'll say the one-to-one. The person who knows without being told that today is a bad day. Who knows the exact sentence that talks a meltdown back down. Who is, for six and a half hours a day, the bridge between a child who communicates differently and a system built for children who don't.

And then, having built that in your head, consider this: that person is very possibly employed on worse terms than almost anyone else in the building.

What the job actually is

A one-to-one — sometimes called a Learning Support Assistant, sometimes a TA, sometimes just "Miss" or "the helper" — is the adult assigned to support a single child with an Education, Health and Care Plan through their school day. In practice that means far more than the job title suggests: reading a child's dysregulation before it becomes a crisis, translating between a class teacher who has twenty-nine other children and a child who needs something different, managing personal care, managing panic, managing the walk from one room to another that everyone else takes for granted.

It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most skilled relational jobs in a school building. It is also, structurally, one of the most precarious.

What the data actually shows

288,800 FTEteaching assistants now work in English state schools — up by over 67,000 since 2011, as SEND support needs have grown.

38–39 weeks paidis standard for a term-time-only contract — the position most one-to-ones are employed on, meaning no pay through the school holidays.

14.3% of hoursis the standard formula for calculating holiday pay for agency-employed TAs — a different, generally worse deal than a directly employed member of staff gets.

No SSP if sick in the holidays— HMRC's own guidance confirms a term-time-only worker who falls ill outside contracted weeks isn't entitled to Statutory Sick Pay, because they're technically not employed during that period.

Sources: DfE School Workforce Census 2024/25; UNISON and Commons Library briefings on school support staff pay and conditions; HMRC Statutory Payments Manual.

Why this becomes a children's issue, not just a workforce issue

None of this would matter quite so much if the relationship between a child and their one-to-one weren't so central to how that child experiences school. But it is. And a workforce paid like this, on contracts like this, with job security like this, is a workforce that turns over.

In the families we've worked alongside, one story comes back again and again, in different words: a child finally settles with someone. Learns to trust them. The one-to-one learns, without ever being told directly, that this child likes their shoe looser on the left, flinches at the fire alarm test, needs "two more minutes" rather than "nearly done." None of that is written down anywhere. It lives in the relationship. And then, because a contract wasn't renewed, or an agency reassigned them, or the pay simply wasn't sustainable — it's gone. The child starts again with a stranger, and often more than once a year.

Every parent we've supported who has been through this describes the same specific grief: not anger at any one person, but exhaustion at a system that treats the most important relationship in their child's day as endlessly, casually replaceable.

What actually helps

This isn't a problem any one family can fix. But there are things worth knowing if you're navigating it right now:

Ask for continuity in writing

You can request that continuity of one-to-one support be written into your child's SEN support plan or, if they have one, their EHCP. It won't guarantee a contract gets renewed, but it puts the school and local authority on record about why it matters, and gives you something concrete to point to if support changes without warning.

Ask what happens to what the one-to-one knows

Most of what a one-to-one learns about your child never gets formally handed over when they leave. Ask the school directly: is there a handover document? If there isn't, consider writing one yourself — the sensory triggers, the calming phrases, the small things that make a hard day easier — and asking for it to be kept on file. It shouldn't be your job. Right now, often, it's the only way that knowledge survives a staff change.

Know that you're allowed to ask about employment terms

You're not being nosy by asking whether your child's one-to-one is agency or directly employed, term-time or full-year. It directly affects how likely they are to still be there next term — and that's information that affects your child.

The people doing this work deserve better terms. The children who depend on them deserve continuity that doesn't hinge on whether an individual can afford to stay in a job that doesn't pay through August. Until that changes structurally, the best any of us can do is understand the system clearly enough to push back on it — which is, in the end, exactly what Fill My Form Direct exists to help with.