Education Assistant (EA) and Student Support Assistant (SSA)

Education assistants (EAs) and student support assistants (SSAs) provide direct, hands-on support to students with diverse learning needs, disabilities, and behavioural requirements in British Columbia schools. These workers—overwhelmingly women, often holding post-secondary credentials—manage crisis intervention, deliver accommodations, facilitate inclusion, and absorb violence at rates far exceeding teachers, yet occupy a legal and professional grey zone: they carry responsibility for student safety without statutory duty of care, work under conditions requiring specialized skills without mandatory provincial training standards, and perform labour essential to inclusive education while remaining systematically excluded from planning, decision-making, and adequate compensation. This tag collects writing on how education assistant precarity functions as infrastructure for exclusion—when the adults tasked with making inclusion possible earn poverty wages, rotate across multiple classrooms without planning time, receive minimal preparation for complex behavioural support, and burn out or leave mid-year, disabled students lose access, schools resort to removal rather than accommodation, and the relational continuity inclusion requires becomes structurally impossible. Understanding education assistant working conditions is essential to understanding why BC schools exclude disabled students: precarity is not incidental to exclusion but enables it, absorbing the pressure that would otherwise force districts to acknowledge the gap between inclusive education policy and exclusionary practice.