Child Advocate Responds To Proposed Education Reforms

The Office of the Child and Youth Advocate is taking a cautious approach on portions of the province’s green paper on proposed education reform.

The paper was unveiled last fall but the child and youth watchdog just released its response Monday as part of Child Rights and Education Week.

While the office welcomed many of the proposals, it raised a “note of caution” about the approach to the proposed elimination of grade levels and second language reform.

“That’s the kind of change that families and stakeholders have warned against,” Christian Whalen, the deputy child and youth advocate, said in a phone interview.

The green paper proposed eliminating grade levels in stages and replacing them with “flexible learning environments” to ensure students are engaged and challenged.

Government also committed to ensuring all students achieve, at a minimum, conversational proficiency in both official languages by the time they graduate from high school.

In its submission, the office said it does not make sense to “do away with the streaming that is created by having both immersion and non-immersion programs, while also inviting an intentional streaming of learners according to their academic success.”

Instead, the watchdog suggests having a single system that offers second language immersion for all anglophone learners.

But Whalen questioned if this is an issue that even needs to be revisited at this point in time.

“We just need to let teachers do their job, execute well in the classroom, but provide them with the supports and the direction overall of education, but not get down into the weeds,” he said.

Despite those concerns, the office said it is “very much encouraged by the tone and the scope” of the green paper.

Whalen said they were pleased to see the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development is sticking with its 10-year education plan.

“That they think that educators are the people in the classroom that need to lead the reform and they heard the auditor general when they said stop tinkering and reinventing education every five years,” he said.

The office also supports the establishment of an all-party committee on education to review the Education Act every 10 years and the decentralizing of decision-making for schools.

Whalen said the call for a “world-class civics program” is an opportunity to think about how to position children as rights holders and give them a say in the way their schools are run.

“That’s important, we think, in making sure that kids actually want to be in school,” he said.