Jenny Hartland says special needs support is being handed over to staff with no experience, while Susan Buckley says teaching assistants are being saddled with extra work for no extra pay. Plus letters from Dr Jeff Penfold and Toby Wood

I am saddened but unsurprised by your report on the (mis)use of teaching assistants in schools ( Teaching assistants routinely cover lessons in England and Wales, survey finds, 26 April ). Back in 2005, I was a special needs teacher employed centrally by the local education authority, and worked in mainstream primary schools on a one-to-one basis with children with statements of special educational need. Around this time, funding for this service was being run down and transferred to individual schools. On two occasions, I was told by a headteacher that they would no longer be using our service – with all its resources and expertise – and would I please explain to a teaching assistant what I did.

The first time, to my shame, I complied. The second time I refused. Thirty-five years as a primary teacher – half of that time in special needs, with all the in-service training that accompanied the role – was not going to be reduced to a half-hour chat with an untrained assistant who was to take over my job, at a much reduced salary. What an insult to all concerned.
Jenny Hartland
York

It’s a recruitment and retention emergency when even desirable schools can’t fill vacancies. This is what a crisis looks like

Lucy Kellaway loves teaching. She came to it remarkably late, deciding to retrain at 58 after a long career in financial journalism, but is so evangelical about the switch that she set up a charity to help others do the same. Now Teach has since supported more than 800 people into the classroom, many leaving lucrative careers in banking or law and disproportionately entering areas of desperate shortage, such as science and maths. Though still a relatively tiny drop in the educational ocean, the scheme was growing, with expressions of interest among over-50s up 52% last year. But perhaps its real value, amid a relentless barrage of offputting stories from the chalkface, is that its optimistic stories of midlife reinvention caught the imagination of people seeking more meaning in their working lives, making teaching sound like an aspirational and emotionally rewarding thing to do.

Well, not any more. After the Department for Education abruptly scrapped its grant , this September’s intake will be Now Teach’s last unless a solution can be found. Another bright spot snuffed out, rounding out what has been a very dark week for veteran teachers clinging on by their fingernails to a career that they, too, once used to love.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

The government’s scrapping of the Now Teach scheme, which has overdelivered on targets for older workers, has sparked an outcry

Ministers have been accused of making a crisis in the recruitment of teachers even worse after axing funding to a much-praised programme helping older workers start a new career in the classroom.

An outcry is already beginning over the decision to axe the career change programme, with organisers complaining that there “will be barely anyone left to teach our children” unless Rishi Sunak lives up to his party conference pledge to prioritise education.

Exclusive: New research shows extent to which schools are struggling to provide qualified teachers for every class

Hundreds of thousands of pupils in England and Wales are being educated “on the cheap” by low-paid teaching assistants (TAs) covering lessons for teachers who are off sick or have quit, according to new research.

A desperate teacher recruitment crisis, compounded by inadequate funding, means schools across the country are struggling to put a qualified teacher at the front of every class, unions say.

Teachers say behaviour getting worse as survey also shows parents getting less supportive of school policies

Only two in five children in England say they always feel safe at school, according to a government survey, and teachers from across Britain have told the Guardian they have seen pupils’ behaviour deteriorate over the last two years.

Teachers said violence and abuse aimed at school staff and other students had increased alongside displays of homophobia, racism and sexism, with women in particular bearing the brunt of aggressive sexual remarks.

How one teacher wrestles meaning and relevance from classics of English literature

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the books you studied at school are the ones that stick with you for ever. In my case it was Pride and Prejudice, but for you it might have been Macbeth or Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses. These are the texts you know by heart because, once upon a time, you spent two years annotating them using different coloured pens and consigning chunks to memory.

But what broader, deeper kinds of learning might be available to teenagers studying English literature at school, asks Carol Atherton . For the past 25 years she has taught both GCSE and A-level in state secondary schools in Lincolnshire. Now, in a dozen carefully prepared “reading lessons”, she demonstrates how a generous and attentive teacher is able to wrestle meaning and relevance from old warhorses such as An Inspector Calls and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings .

Arts education is essential – yet on both sides of the Atlantic, the humanities and critical thinking are under attack. With massive redundancies announced at this London institution, is it the canary in the coalmine?

It is a couple of days before Easter, and the students who have been holding a sit-in in the Professor Stuart Hall building in Goldsmiths, University of London are packing up. The large basement smells of duvets and camping mats and solidarity and liveliness, and deodorant sprayed on in a hurry under a T-shirt, and it smells like a place where people have slept, which 20 of them have done since 20 February, with crowds swelling to 100 for spontaneous lectures.

This isn’t a story about idiot idealists making futile gestures: Mark Peacock, a 28-year-old postgraduate student in the politics department, rattles through a number of concessions the senior management team at the university has made as a result of the action. Yet Danna MacRae, 24, studying for an MA in ecology, culture and society, says the occupation has been greater than the sum of its demands: “It’s about opening up the literal physical space but also the social space to expand political possibilities. So much becomes possible when you’re living together 24/7.” I read their banner as they’re furling it up: among other things, it calls for the university to protect students’ right to protest, expand scholarships for Palestinian students and divest from any company providing equipment to Israel.

Christine Gilbert will examine response to headteacher Ruth Perry’s suicide after her school was downgraded

A former head of Ofsted is to lead a learning review into the inspectorate’s response to the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry , prompting concerns from the family about how independent it will be.

Dame Christine Gilbert, who served as Ofsted’s chief inspector from 2006 to 2011, will produce a written report of her findings later this year, it was announced on Monday.

Women with symptoms are being penalised, National Education Union’s annual conference told

The UK’s biggest teaching union is to lobby for menopause training to be made mandatory for all school leaders, saying women with symptoms are being penalised for sickness absence and disciplined on competency grounds.

Older staff were at greatest risk of “capability procedures”, delegates at the National Education Union’s (NEU) annual conference in Bournemouth were told, while others are being forced out of their jobs, affecting not only their income but their pensions.