Using the Wider Pedagogical Role model to establish learning support assistants' views about facilitators and barriers to effective practice

This article reports on small-scale research exploring the views of learning support assistants (LSAs) about facilitators and barriers to effective practice. A focus group was conveyed involving all the LSAs working in one mainstream primary school in the north-west of England and thematic analysis was used to interrogate the resultant dataset. The Wider Pedagogical Role (WPR) model (Webster et al., 2011) was used as a deductive framework to conceptualise these findings under the headings of practice, deployment, conditions of employment, preparedness and characteristics. Findings revealed that LSAs could readily identify current facilitators and barriers under each of the five components, highlighting the usefulness of the WPR model. Possibilities for future research, including the refinement and further development of the WPR, are briefly discussed.