I work as a Teaching Assistant (TA) in a Brighton and Hove primary school and, although I am not going on strike, I support my colleagues who are and will stand on the picket line with them to explain to parents our concerns and will work to rule.

Brighton and Hove City Council are making us out to be mean-hearted and money-grabbing but nothing could be further from the truth.

For many years we have been underpaid for a job teachers have come to value and rely on. We regard it as a career and have taken a lot of training and qualifications to help us teach the children - for teach them we do.

Many of us specialise in teaching children with special needs or behavioural problems.

There is a misconception that we are only in the job because we want long, paid holidays the same as teachers.

However, most of us are parents who no longer have any reason to have part-time jobs with holidays off, as our families have grown up.

Some of us turn up to help teachers prepare during holidays. We care for all the children in our care and do our utmost to help educate and provide for them.

I work Monday-Friday, 8.45am-4pm, but am only paid for five-and-a-half hours a day, 27.5 a week. I rarely get a tea break or a full lunch break of 50 minutes. For this I get roughly £9,500 a year.

Many of us work way beyond our paid hours and spend money of our own buying things for classes or to help teach "our children".

As our teachers are given more and more paperwork and red tape, a lot of their work is passed down to us. If we are supposed to be in class teaching the children, when are we meant to do all this extra?

What the council and Government fail to recognise is the job often warrants being made into a full-time position to enable us to continue to work with the children and do displays, paperwork and so on after they leave.

I would ask all parents to take a look at what work is done by the TAs in school. We get to do the jobs of teachers, nurses, cleaners, secretaries, counsellors, child welfare and caretakers, all in one day.

For this, the education department want to give us a pay rise but first take away four to five weeks' pay. In other words, they want to change our terms from 49.5 weeks pay to (for me) 45.7.

I am lucky, as I have been graded slightly higher (I have been a TA for ten years and am a team leader on a C grade) and will receive more money than my friends. However, some of them will see little change, which is hardly fair when some of them have also been in the job for ten years or more.

The teachers in my school are very supportive and we hope parents will feel able to give us their support too.

After all, a council which can award itself a decent pay rise and a large expense account deserve to have its motives for reducing our number of weeks' paid questioned.

-Vanessa Bell, Portslade