The Psychological Foundations of The Mediating Learning Support Assistant (MeLSA) Training Programme

It is estimated that a quarter of the mainstream school workforce in the UK are learning support staff. This is a substantial number of adults who have the potential to foster learning. This paper provides a brief summary regarding the impact of support staff on children and young people’s learning. It describes how the Mediating Learning Support Assistant (MeLSA) training programme was developed to meet a training gap identified in the literature. This paper also details the psychological theories and research evidence which provide the foundations for MeLSA and describes the format of the training programme, which consists of six days (mediating learning and mindset, thinking about thinking, memory and recall, mathematics, literacy, and implementation) followed by ongoing supervision. The aim of MeLSA is to ensure that learning support staff have the psychological and evidence-informed expertise to enable those with whom they are working to become competent and independent learners.