The flexibility paradox: How to manage complexity in the work of educational paraprofessionals

Abstract

Educational paraprofessionals (EPs) play a vital yet often under-recognized role in contemporary schools, supporting students through direct, daily interaction. Known variously as “teaching assistants”, “classroom assistants”, “learning support assistants”, and other titles, they remain central to school life yet frequently face unclear job expectations, limited training, and insecure employment conditions. While previous research has highlighted role ambiguity as a key stressor and has advocated for role clarification, this opinion piece challenges the assumption that clarity alone can ensure sustainable working conditions. Drawing on fieldwork from three Swedish lower-secondary schools, I argue for a complexity-reduction approach that includes early expectation alignment, active management of communication load, protective organizational routines, and strategic attention to transition points such as the start of the school day. EPs' work involves intense, synchronous, face-to-face interaction that amplifies demands and complicates coordination. To achieve sustainability, work design must balance the need for structure with the inherently interpersonal and fluid nature of school life.

In classrooms and school corridors worldwide, a quiet but significant shift has taken place as a variety of support roles have become central to everyday school life (Bisht et al., 2021; Government Australia, 2023; Government UK, 2022). These support roles are deployed on the front lines and entrusted with supporting students through regular, direct contact, and guidance. Despite forming the backbone of everyday school life, many of these individuals are young people entering the job market for the first time, often untrained and facing insecure employments (Butler, 2019). They hold job titles such as “teaching assistants,” “classroom assistants,” “learning support assistants,” and similar. These occupational groups are commonly described using the umbrella term Educational Paraprofessionals (EP) (Bishop, 2022).

When EP staff start working in schools, they often experience intense and demanding workdays as they end up “doing it all” at “all times” (Bradwell and Bending, 2024; Schofield et al., 2022). The conclusion drawn by most research is that their work is poorly organized, especially due to a lack of role clarity (Lehane, 2013; Orchard, 2023). Consequently, a common recommendation is to strive for role clarification (Gilboa et al., 2008).

This opinion piece draws on complexity theory by viewing schools as inherently complex organizations that differ in key ways from other workplaces. I argue that focusing solely on clarifying the role of EPs is insufficient; instead, this should be complemented by strategies aimed at reducing complexity. By doing so, school management can foster a sustainable working environment for staff, which ultimately benefits the entire school community, including the students.

The arguments are informed by ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three Swedish lower secondary schools, where EP staff were shadowed over the course of one semester. The research project was funded by grants from the Swedish research council (Ref. 2022-02908).

Schools as dynamic organizations

A frequently suggested approach to integrating EP staff, as previously noted, is to strive for role clarification. However, our fieldwork highlights a tension between a narrowly defined professional role—which often fails to capture the complex and dynamic realities of school life—and the value of flexibility and the ability to respond to unpredictable situations. After spending a few days at a school, I asked the EP staff if they wished for a clearer definition of their role—something like, “this is part of the job,” and “this is not.” After some discussion, they agreed that having an overly defined role was impossible. They explained that you need to be “flexible,” “caring,” and “willing.” They emphasized, “It's impossible if you’re rigid,” and added, “This is the reality we’re working with.”

In sum, the EPs’ reflections on their professional roles were often linked to the unpredictability that characterizes daily life in schools. This unpredictability was confirmed during our fieldwork, where we observed numerous unforeseen situations arising suddenly in corridors, classrooms, and schoolyards. These moments unfolded spontaneously and without warning, often demanding immediate responses from EP staff and couldn’t be anticipated or planned for in advance. To a great extent, the flexibility they emphasized appeared to be a necessary adaptation to managing such a work environment.

Schools are dynamic organizations that can be viewed through the lens of complexity theories, where situations and events do not arise from simple causality or cause-and-effect relationships (Gough, 2012; Hawkins and James, 2016). A narrowly defined professional role fails to acknowledge this complexity in schools. Yet, at the same time, the high level of work unpredictability can negatively impact employeeś daily well-being (Schoellbauer et al., 2022). Thus, to establish a sustainable balance in EP work it seems important to consider complexity reduction in terms of “reducing the number of available options for action for the elements within a system,” which can be achieved through “the establishment of a set of organizational and/or classroom routines” (Koopmans, 2017: 20).

Routines as complexity reduction

In the book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman (2000) describes two classical discourses with different perspectives on order and disorder in systems: “Whereas in the Joshua discourse, order is the rule and disorder an exception, in the Genesis discourse, disorder is the rule and order the exception” (Bauman, 2000: 54). Following Fidan and Balcı (2017), schools are social systems that can be understood through the lens of the Genesis discourse. Structures and routines are needed to reduce the ever-present risks of disorder and to increase the possibility that order is established rather than order becoming “the exception.” Order is not the default state; it requires effort and energy to establish it.

A distinct feature of complex organizations is their sensitivity to initial conditions (Koopmans, 2014), which makes institutionalized structures and routines particularly powerful during critical starting points. Gardesten and Herrlin (2024) describe how the beginning of a school day can serve as such a starting point, where small incidents may significantly influence what unfolds over the course of the day. In complex organizations, there is a risk of “butterfly effects,” where minor changes to baseline conditions can result in “major turbulence and unpredictability later on” (Koopmans, 2014: 31–32). During our fieldwork, we therefore paid particular attention to how each school day began at the three schools we visited. At one school, EP staff participated in morning briefings for about an hour each day before hundreds of students poured into the school building, setting corridors, and classrooms alight with a flurry of interactions among students, teachers, and EP staff. In contrast, another school in the project lacked structured morning routines. There, contact between EP staff and teachers often occurred spontaneously in the hallway just before the first lesson, with EPs receiving last-minute instructions on tasks resulting from teacher absences due to illness or other unforeseen events. This illustrates how a lack of structure can disrupt baseline conditions, paving the way for “major turbulence and unpredictability later on” (Koopmans, 2014: 31–32). Improvised classroom management may trigger disruptive student behavior, heightening staff anxiety and contributing to a sense of inadequacy for the deputizing EP.

Although clearly defined routines can help reduce complexity in schools, Pentland and Feldman (2008) suggest that organizational routines can sometimes sustain complexity within an organization, especially when the routines involve functional events driven by human interactions:

Events that occur between two humans are most ‘alive.’ They are most subject to agency and improvisation, learning by experience, and also to the private intentions of the participants. Each time the event occurs, the participants have the opportunity to (re)enact it according to their preferences at that moment. (Pentland and Feldman, 2008: 246).

In our research project, we found that the flexibility of EP work in schools stems from frequent human-to-human interactions, where small dilemmas are addressed as they arise. In line with Pentland and Feldman (2008), we observed that such interactions are “alive,” offering EPs the opportunity to (re)enact events in real time. This was evident, for instance, in situations involving student absences, lateness, or concerns conveyed directly by parents—communications that were interpreted and reinterpreted by EPs, who responded in slightly different ways depending on the context.

Such interactions often take place through face-to-face exchanges in school corridors or other informal spaces, and are typically synchronous—that is, they occur in real time and require immediate attention and response. This high degree of synchronicity contributes to the complexity of EP work. As Ployhart and Moliterno (2011) note, professional environments that demand frequent synchronous communication tend to be more complex. Unlike asynchronous communication, such as email, where there is a delay between message and response, synchronous exchanges can create pressure to act quickly and adapt on the spot. Consequently, this immediacy can lead to communication overload (Cho et al., 2011), especially when professionals are required to make rapid decisions under shifting conditions.

Sustainable work in complex organizations

In this opinion piece, I argue that complexity theory can support systematic work environment management in schools by providing a nuanced understanding of the conditions shaping daily work. Schools are inherently complex settings with multiple, often conflicting, purposes. Individual rights must be respected while collective interests are upheld; academic knowledge must be developed and assessed while managing disruptions during and between lessons. Simultaneously, staff must respond to sudden situations that may threaten students’ well-being or integrity.

It is within this stream of ongoing and overlapping events that EP staff must navigate their daily work. For school leaders, it may seem intuitive to clarify the EP role to manage such unpredictability. However, their work becomes nearly impossible to carry out if the job description is too narrowly defined. Below, I present a few alternative suggestions for how their work can be organized in a sustainable way:

Early clarification of expectations. If opportunities for clarifying roles are limited, this can be complemented by early clarification of expectations (Fu et al., 2024). Introducing EP staff to the dynamic nature of schools during induction helps them align their expectations, better prepare for the realities of the job, and develop a balanced understanding of the challenges they will face.

Manage communication modes. Complexity reduction should also address the qualitative aspects of communication. This includes using asynchronous communication channels to supplement or replace face-to-face interactions where appropriate. It may also involve training EP staff to communicate in ways that reduce ambiguity and avoid unintentionally escalating complexity in their interactions with parents, students, or colleagues.

Manage communication load. Attention should be given not only to the types of communication EP staff engage in, but also to its volume. Excessive communication can become a strain. For example, schools might consider limiting access to staff phone numbers or implementing protocols that reduce the number of direct contacts with EP staff. The idea that more communication is always better requires nuance, as effective organizational structures often depend on restricting certain channels of information (Heide et al., 2005).

Protect EP staff from misplaced responsibilities. School leaders should establish clear routines and organizational structures to ensure that responsibilities and issues are routed through the appropriate channels. Our research shows that EP staff, unlike more established school personnel, are often more visible and accessible to students and parents. As a result, they frequently become the first point of contact and may find themselves drawn into handling matters that more appropriately fall under the remit of other professionals—such as school counselors, nurses, or teachers.

Pay special attention to key transition points. Efforts to reduce complexity are particularly effective during transitions—such as the beginning of the school year, the start of the school day, or when new routines are introduced. These are moments when uncertainty tends to peak, leaving staff especially vulnerable to overload. By establishing clear procedures and ensuring everyone knows what to expect, schools can create smoother starts, minimize confusion, and reduce the risk of disruptions spiraling into wider instability.

Conclusion

EP staff are being employed in schools worldwide at a high rate. When they begin working in schools, they often find themselves “doing it all” at “all times” (Bradwell and Bending, 2024). Researchers widely agree that a key challenge in EP work is the lack of clear role definition (Lehane, 2013; Orchard, 2023). In this context, role ambiguity is recognized as a major source of work-related stress (Gilboa et al., 2008), and one suggested solution is to work toward greater role clarity. However, during our research project, EP staff expressed skepticism about this issue, echoing the remark, “This is the reality we’re working with.”

In sum, the EP staff followed in our fieldwork emphasized the importance of judgment and flexibility, arguing that a narrowly defined professional role fails to account for the complex and dynamic nature of school life. Accordingly, stability and sustainability can emerge through means other than the pursuit of role clarity, which previous research has often prioritized. I argue that the concept of complexity reduction offers schools a way to implement structures that enhance predictability and therefore minimize the risk of health impairment due to the work carried out by EP staff.

It's crucial to emphasize that complexity reduction should not diminish the inherent health benefits of working in a contact-based profession (cf. Bengtsson and Flisbäck, 2019). While stability may increase if the organization's routines are not solely based on human-to-human interactions, it is often the communicative and relational qualities of the work that underlie EP staffs’ decision to work in schools. The dynamic relational qualities of school life are demanding but also potentially rewarding and can provide a strong sense of meaning.

In this context, there is a need for more empirical research on how newly hired school staff may be vulnerable to “compassion traps” and, over time, “compassion fatigue.” While previous studies have explored this issue in relation to teachers (Ormiston et al., 2022), no study has specifically focused on EP staff. This is particularly concerning, as EP staff, unlike teachers, often lack the training needed to equip them for the complexities of the school environment and the emotional demands of student-centered work.

Overall, there is compelling evidence that the implementation of EP staff in schools needs to be carefully planned. Overburdening them could have a negative impact on others in the school, including students, teachers, and other staff members. However, a well-considered approach that takes the unique characteristics of the school into account can help enhance stability and reduce work unpredictability, while still preserving the meaningful sense of being important and making a real difference for students.