Teaching assistants praised

The University of York will recognise the important work of 20 local teaching assistants at a formal award ceremony.

According to the local York Press newspaper, the 20 teaching assistants will be rewarded for their pioneering work with young children.

All the 20 teaching assistants have bee involved with a project at the University of York's psychology department which aimed to help improve children's reading skills. It was called the York Reading for Meaning Project.

As a result, they will be given certificates at a ceremony at the university's Henry Wellcome building later this week.

Work involved delivering specialist teaching programmes to small groups of children in years four and five.

Talking to the newspaper, project manager Dr Paula Clarke commented: "The project team have been incredibly impressed by the excellent quality of their work and will be recognising the efforts of the teaching assistants with a formal certificate presentation and wine reception.

"The project team from the department of psychology would like to thank all of these schools for their assistance and support."

Dr Clarke went on to explain that the most recent research had shown that children need to learn to break words into their component sounds and to understand the meaning of words and sentences if reading skills are to properly develop.