Research undertaken at the University of London’s Institute of Education hit the media headlines in early September, following the publication of the final report on the deployment and impact of support staff in schools (DISS) project. This was a large-scale five-year study covering England and Wales, which reported that teaching assistants boost teachers’ productivity but not pupils’ progress in English, Maths and Science. When a government-funded report claims that teaching assistants impair children’s progress, perhaps the time has come at long last to sit up and reconsider what is unproblematically accepted as common practice. As CSIE’s publication Learning Supporters and Inclusion flagged up nearly a decade ago, learning supporters are often being asked to take on considerable extra responsibility at low pay, minimum job security and often with insufficient training. In a system that seems to be sustained largely by the goodwill and commitment of the individuals involved, the time for change is long overdue. Last but not least, let us not forget the qualitative impact that learning supporters can have on young people’s lives. Every single learning supporter stands to have a hugely significant impact on the experience children have in mainstream schools and on everyone’s sense of belonging in the school community. Equating children’s progress with their academic achievement is only a narrow view of progress. Worse still, evaluating the impact of support staff by such a narrow view of progress seems to do little more than add insult to injury.