Teacher aide and education support selection criteria examples

I work within each student’s individual education plan and behaviour support plan, and for the past year I have also coordinated the timetable for my school’s three integration aides.

At Silverleaf Primary School I support a Year 4 student with autism whose behaviour support plan sets out early signs of distress, agreed calming strategies and when to call for help. When I started, aides were responding in different ways, and the student was leaving the classroom three or four times a week.

With the classroom teacher, I turned the plan into a one-page guide showing the calming options and the exact words we had agreed to use, and the teacher checked it against the plan before we shared it. I followed the same steps every time, recorded each incident on the school’s template the same day and gave the teacher a short summary each Friday. When the assistant principal asked me to coordinate the aides, I built a roster that kept a familiar aide with the student each session, set out cover for absences, and briefed the other two aides on the guide.

Over Term 3 the student left the classroom twice in total, and the learning support team now uses my one-page format for two other students.

For four years I have worked with students with physical and intellectual disability in a support class at Coolabah Heights High School, under the direction of the class teacher and in line with each student’s plans.

Last year a Year 8 student who uses a wheelchair and a communication device joined our class. Her health care plan included mealtime support and repositioning, and her teacher wanted her to communicate more independently rather than relying on adults to speak for her.

I completed the training for her health care procedures before her first day, followed the plan exactly and recorded each intervention in the school’s register. With the teacher and her speech pathologist, I learned how her device was set up and added vocabulary for each new unit before lessons began. In class I waited for her to answer instead of answering for her, and I modelled the device’s core words during group work so other students learned to talk with her. At lunch I gradually reduced my help with eating, as her plan allowed, and noted in her communication book what she had done on her own.

By the end of the year she was answering questions with her device several times a lesson, and she ate lunch with two friends while I stayed nearby. Her teacher used my vocabulary lists in her plan review.

For two years I have run teacher-planned reading and maths groups three mornings a week at Paperbark Creek State School, and I keep the records teachers use to decide what each student needs next.

In 2025 the Year 1 teachers identified nine students not yet reading the decodable texts expected by mid-year. The teachers planned the program; my job was to deliver the small-group sessions and track progress.

I met the teachers each Monday to go through the week’s sounds and texts and to ask how they wanted errors corrected, so my prompts matched theirs. Each session I ran a five-minute sound review with flashcards, then had students read aloud in turn while I recorded errors on a tracking sheet. When I noticed two students guessing from the pictures, I told their teacher, who asked me to cover the pictures on the first read. Twice a week I also ran a 15-minute number facts group using the teachers’ games. Every Friday I gave the teachers my tracking sheets and a short note on each student.

By the end of Term 3, seven of the nine students were reading at the expected level, and the teachers asked me to take a second group in Term 4.

Clear, regular communication with teachers and families is a core part of my work as an education assistant in a junior primary class at Coastal Plains Primary School.

Last year I supported a Pre-primary student with type 1 diabetes. His parents were worried about how his blood glucose was managed at school, and handover notes between his teacher, the front office and me were inconsistent.

After completing the training his health care plan required, I worked with his teacher to redesign his daily communication book: a one-page sheet for check times, readings, what he ate and anything unusual, which I filled in at each check and copied to the teacher each afternoon. After the first week I phoned his mother to ask whether the sheet told her what she needed, and added a line for activity before lunch at her request. When a reading was outside his plan’s range, I followed its steps, told the teacher straight away and wrote a note for the family that afternoon. I also briefed relief staff on the sheet whenever I was away.

By the end of Term 1 his parents no longer rang the school each day, and the school adopted the sheet for two other students with health care plans.