The Datum Report

Occupation 6112 · Caring, leisure and other service occupations

Teaching assistants

Half of full-time teaching assistants in the UK earn more than £21,239 a year, and half earn less.

Teaching assistants assist teachers with their day-to-day classroom work and with routine administrative tasks.

How people enter it

Academic qualifications may be required by some employers, although entry is possible with relevant experience (possibly on a voluntary basis) alone. NVQs at level 2 and 3 qualifications are available. DBS clearance is mandatory.

What the work involves

• assists teacher with preparation or clearing up of classroom
• looks after lesson materials such as paper, pencils and crayons
• listens to children read, reads to them or tells stories
• assists children with washing or dressing for outdoor and similar activities
• makes simple teaching aids and constructs thematic displays of educational material or children’s work
• helps with outings and other out-of-classroom activities

Also called

Classroom assistant · School assistant · Teaching assistant

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for teaching assistants, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 11 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Childminders · Early education and childcare assistants · Educational support assistants · Nannies and au pairs · Playworkers