Twenty Minutes a Month: The Evidence Habit That Quietly Pays Off at TA Appraisal Time

Every school has one. The TA who sits down in July, stares at a blank appraisal form and says, "Well, I've been doing phonics interventions since September, but I couldn't tell you what I did in October." It isn't laziness. It's just that the job runs at a pace where the last thing on your mind at 3:20pm is writing down what happened at 10:15am.

So here's a suggestion that sounds almost too simple: spend twenty minutes a month keeping a rough record of what you've done. Not a formal portfolio. Not a folder of certificates gathering dust in a cupboard. Just enough notes that, when someone asks what difference you've made, you've got something better than a vague shrug.

The problem is recall, not effort

Appraisal paperwork tends to assume you've been keeping a log all year. Nobody tells you that in September. You get told about the cycle in a staff briefing, you nod, you get on with the actual job, and then a calendar invite appears with your name on it and a form attached.

Meanwhile, the things worth capturing slip past almost invisibly. The Year 4 pupil who finally blended a word without prompting. The six-week block of catch-up sessions you ran in place of a colleague. The INSET you attended on speech and language, which changed how you set up your table groups. Individually, none of them feel like headline material. Together, they're the whole story of your year.

What's worth writing down

You don't need to log everything. A workable rule is: anything you'd want to mention if you had ninety seconds to make your case.

In practice, that's usually four kinds of thing:

• Training. Not just the big courses — the twilight session on safeguarding updates, the online module on keeping children safe, the manual handling refresher, the phonics scheme training your school ran in-house.
• Observations and feedback. If someone watched you teach, run a group or manage a transition, note the date and anything useful that came back. A head of year saying "the routine you've set up in that group is working" is evidence, even if it wasn't written on a form.
• Interventions and provision. What you delivered, to whom, for how long, and roughly what changed. Whole-class support counts too — plenty of TAs spend their day scaffolding rather than running discrete programmes.
• The small wins. The pupil who now comes in without a fight. The parent who stopped avoiding you at the gate. The reading record that's actually being filled in now.

The twenty-minute template

Keep it dull. Dull things survive.

A simple monthly note with four lines works: what I delivered, what I learned, what changed, what I want next. Drop it in a notes app, a Word document, an email to yourself — whatever you'll actually open. If your school uses an online CPD platform, use that instead, but don't let a clunky system become the reason you skip it.

Pick a fixed moment. Last Friday of the month. The ten minutes before an INSET starts. The point is to make it automatic rather than noble.

Describing impact without sounding like a LinkedIn post

The trap here is overselling. TAs are often told to "demonstrate impact", which can push people into writing things that don't survive a follow-up question.

A better approach is to describe change in plain terms, with a limit on the claim. Compare these:

• Overreach: "Transformed pupil outcomes in literacy across Key Stage 1."
• Useful: "Ran daily fifteen-minute phonics catch-up with three Year 1 pupils from January. Two of the three moved up a book band by Easter; the third made progress in blending but still needs support with fluency."

The second version is more convincing precisely because it admits something didn't fully work. It also gives you a ready answer when someone asks what you'd do differently.

Where you have numbers, use them — sessions delivered, pupils supported, attendance at a club, percentage of a class reading at home. Where you don't, describe the behaviour you saw: settled faster, needed fewer prompts, started asking for help rather than opting out.

The same file, three other uses

This is the part people underestimate. An evidence file isn't only for appraisal.

Pay-band reviews. If you're on TA2 and doing work that looks a lot like TA3, you need specifics, not a general feeling of being undervalued. Dates, responsibilities, and examples of independent delivery do far more for that conversation than frustration does.

Interviews. Almost every TA interview includes something like "tell us about a time you supported a child with additional needs." Having a year of examples in front of you beats trying to dredge one up from memory on the bus.

Moving schools. When you write a personal statement or update a CV, you're really translating this file into sentences. Starting from notes is a different job from starting from nothing.

Where people trip up

Three things tend to go wrong.

First, people wait until the work is impressive enough to record. It never feels impressive enough. Record it anyway.

Second, people record activities rather than outcomes. "Attended phonics training" is a line item; "changed my group's daily routine after the phonics training and saw fewer off-task minutes" is a story.

Third, people make the file too grand. If maintaining it takes an hour, you'll abandon it by November. Twenty minutes, four headings, spelling mistakes entirely permitted.

Start with last Tuesday

You don't need to reconstruct the whole academic year. Begin with what you did last week, and let the file build from there. By the next appraisal cycle you'll walk in with something that looks suspiciously like a professional portfolio — even though all you did was spend twenty minutes a month writing down things you'd otherwise have forgotten.

The system isn't the point. The point is that the work you're already doing deserves a record. Nobody else is keeping one for you.