EDITORIAL | What This Provincial Election Could Mean For Education: An Evaluation

Photo Credit: Legislative Assembly of British Columbia

After a tight election in which the BC NDP or BC Conservatives were seats away from forming government, the NDP narrowly secured 47 seats, the minimum amount needed to form a majority. The Conservatives won 44 and the Greens won two. At the beginning of a new chapter for BC, The Nest’s Editorial Board believes it is imperative for educational stakeholders to understand where parties’ priorities lie.

The NDP and Conservatives’ education policies are seemingly completely contradictory to one another, and as both parties will have significant power within the legislative assembly, fact-checking and analyzing the parties' platforms becomes all the more pertinent.

This election marks a pivotal point for educational policy within BC, and the Ministry of Education has the opportunity to greatly enhance the well-being and performance of the province’s students. Both Premier David Eby and Official Opposition leader John Rustad have visions for the future; whether or not these visions benefit the province’s students remains to be seen. The Nest’s editorial board has consolidated the major points of contention brought forward in parties’ campaigns this election.

1) SOGI 123

A major change proposed by the BC Conservatives is the replacement of the SOGI 123 resources with anti-bullying programs. The party also aims to remove everything that stemmed from the SOGI guidelines and resources. 

"When kids go to school, parents trust and expect the school to provide a quality education in a safe environment – not activist ideology that could send kids down a dangerous path,” Rustad told Black Press Media. The driving force behind this decision is Rustad’s belief that  “students should be taught how to think, not what to think.” 

However, The Nest finds his point is contradictory to the reality of SOGI 123. According to BC Gov News, its simply a resource endorsed by the Ministry of Education that provides “schools and teachers with ready to use, grade - level appropriate lesson plans, online learning modules, and customizable templates and tools that align with BC's new curriculum.”

There is nothing outlined in the curriculum that states that the use of SOGI 123 is mandatory; it merely gives teachers the opportunity to start meaningful and considerate conversations about gender identity, inclusivity, and the discouragement of harmful stereotypes. 

The proposed cancellation of the SOGI 123 programs would be detrimental to the ongoing education of students regarding societal issues and discrimination. While opinions should never be forced upon individuals, positive and inclusive views about minority groups should be taught in schools. Students are under no obligation to agree with the material they are being taught, but they must be able to understand diverse points of view and respect those different from themselves. Removing this program would only accomplish one thing: pushing BC schools back in time, away from modern diversity and inclusion and returning to the education systems of the past, which seldom included these important concepts. 

The NDP oppose the Conservatives on this issue, and they outline on their campaign website that they have taken important steps toward inclusivity, like implementing the SOGI 123 programs to all BC school districts. “Together, we can raise our voices to drown out hate, and show that BC is a place where everyone is truly free to be who they are,” the NDP states.

2) Building New Schools

While the NDP can tout a $4.9 billion total invested in school capital projects since 2017, the party has still failed to account for enormous enrolment growth across the province, jeopardizing the education of all students, particularly those in Surrey. 

The Conservatives, on the other hand, can only boast talking points and plans for further cuts. Neither party has committed to delivering the spaces students need to learn successfully.

Schools in Surrey are terribly overcrowded. In the 2023-24 academic year, the district’s utilization rate, calculated by dividing total student environment by classroom capacity, was 103 per cent, leaving 83 per cent of schools over capacity.

And without new schools, the problem will only to get worse. In the next five years, 26,142 new housing units are projected to be constructed in Surrey, 3,600 more than were constructed in the past five years. For the past two academic years, the District added 2,400 new students annually, and in the current academic year, 3,000 new students are expected.

At the beginning of the previous academic year, the District put out a survey asking parents for ideas to address overcrowding. An option proposed included having students attend school in shifts, half in the morning and half in the evening, with school finishing at 8 PM for some. Students could have to attend classes online, some of which would be held over the summer.

Some parents even feared they would have to homeschool their children, simply due to a lack of space in schools. However, all such possibilities undercut the public school system and leave students in certain areas with a sub-par educational opportunities.

“Surrey kids, Surrey parents, deserve to have equity when it comes to education. And right now, they don’t have it,” Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke told The Globe and Mail.

Parents are also pushing back against what may become a bizarre new normal.

“We just went through a pandemic. It is in almost immediate memory, and the challenges that families had, of having to school their kids online and supervised schooling outside of school, were immense,” Amy Johston, a mother of two in Surrey, told The Globe and Mail.

While such proposed measures may seem drastic, another band-aid solution is already clandestinely harming students’ education. In the previous academic year, 10 per cent of Surrey students attended class in portables. Beyond the day-to-day implications of having to go to school in facilities that lack air conditioning and in some cases washrooms, a larger issue is at stake. 

In BC, portables are funded by a school board’s operational budget, unlike new schools, which are funded by the province’s capital budget. For every portable the District installs and maintains, students across Surrey suffer, massively undermining public education. 

According to Surrey Board of Education trustee Terry Allen, the District has already been forced to make service and program cuts in its upcoming budget, and therefore doesn’t “have one more penny to put into portables”, and he told Surrey Now–Leader.

Surrey City Council recently declared the school capacity situation a “crisis.” And yet both the NDP and Conservatives repeatedly refuse to take meaningful action.

In May, Trustees unanimously approved the Board’s annual five-year capital plan, requesting $5.03 billion in funding from the province to construct 20 new schools, and 19 school additions alongside them.

In March, however, the NDP committed $3.75 billion over the next three years for school capital projects across the entire province. For reference, the VSB’s draft 2024–25 draft five-year capital calls for $1.88 billion in funds from the province. 

Averaging the funds on a yearly basis, the province’s two largest school districts require $1.38 billion in capital funds, primarily to keep up with enrollment growth and ensure seismic safety. The NDP’s plan only allocates an average of $1.25 billion per year. 

Adding in the significant capacity struggles of other districts — BC has a total of 60 school boards — the NDP is massively under-funding public education in BC.

On a per-capita basis, other districts are experiencing overcrowding worse than Surrey, as measured by the number of students learning in portables. Surrey has 4.6 portables per 1,000 thousand students, the eight highest of any district in the province. Chilliwack, with the highest per-capita portable total, has 5.9 portables per 1,000 students.

Surrey is just the tip of the iceberg.

While the NDP commits to building 20,000 new student seats at 58 sites across the project, the party’s record speaks for itself. Throughout a seven year mandate, the party has failed to address overcrowding in schools. Moreover, The Nest was unable to find any timeline or funding commitment attached to the proposal.

Considering Surrey expects 10,000 new students in the next decade, its unclear whether 20,000 new spaces will address enrolment demand and remove the 2,116 portables beleaguering public education across the province.

But at least the NDP hasn’t sunk as low as proposing class size increases as a remedy for overcrowding. Pledging to remove Surrey's 360 portables, Conservative leader John Rustad proposed steep class-size increases to, in effect, spare the eye-sore for parents.

“Even a 20-per-cent increase [in class sizes] would have the ability to remove a tremendous number of the portables and give parents what they are looking for," Rustad told reporters.

His proposal would terribly undermine student learning and teacher morale at the expense of more pleasant aesthetics.

Portables are taking funds away from the learning services school boards provide across the province, harming the quality of education students receive. All that increasing class sizes will accomplish is undercutting public education in a different way.  

Similarly, the party’s official platform makes several broad statements that lack commitment and specific strategies. The Conservatives claim they will “open new schools when families move-in to a neigbourhood, not years later,” streamline the project approval process, and cut land acquisition costs by constructing more compact schools, but, even with the increased efficiencies, their proposals lack the funding needed to address the problem.

In each of the next two fiscal years, the party promises to add just $60 million to the $1.25 billion in education spending committed by the NDP. However, the additional funds will also go towards other aspects of the Conservatives’ education platform, such as expanding homeschooling and academic excellence programs.

If the entire $60 million were allocated to capital programs, it would still fall short of the $1.38 billion per year Vancouver and Surrey need to properly fund new student spaces and seismic safety.

No matter the province’s next premier, BC students will be dealing with the consequences of overcrowding for years to come.

3) Letter Grades

The BC Conservatives have promised to reinstate letter grades for students from Grades 4 through 9 to “ensure parents and students in all grades have clarity about educational achievement.” The Editorial Board of The Nest supports this policy. The alternative to this, implemented by the NDP, is a proficiency scale, which lacks the clarity and consistency students and parents deserve.

In its current form, the proficiency scale classifies student learning into five categories — Emerging, Developing, Proficient, Extending, and “Insufficient evidence of learning”, a euphemism for an “F.” While the province calls the terms “descriptive,” in reality, they produce a system where parents lack an understanding of their childrens’ learning.

A recent poll conducted by Leger, a research and analytics firm, found 83 per cent of Canadian parents find a grade of “C” to be clear and easily understandable. Seventy-five per cent could correctly identify its meaning. On the other hand, 58 per cent found the grade “Emerging” difficult to understand, and unclear. Only 26 per cent understood its meaning.

Representing one proficiency mark higher than a fail, most teachers would put “Emerging” on the report card of a student who would otherwise have to explain to their parents why they achieved a mark of C minus.

If parents are unaware of or do not understand the learning challenges a student is facing, they are unable to properly support their child’s learning. While districts could attempt to remedy the situation by better communicating the meaning of terms to parents, the fundamental misunderstanding behind the terms may persist, and is even more difficult to adequately address.

For parents who grew up with letter grades, Emerging will never clearly mean, “Your child is almost failing the course, and you have to do something about it,” in the same way as a C minus.

Even in grades as low as four, and particularly in cumulative subjects involving math and writing skills, ensuring student success early on is critical to building the foundational skills students need to perform well in high school. Letter grades will help measure, and reinforce the criteria for success. 

While letter grades may put pressure on students to perform, that may not be a bad thing.

Even in less cumulative subjects, cementing soft-skills that are critical to academic success, by placing value on marks and emphasizing time-management, focus, and goal-setting, will benefit students no matter their career choice. 

These soft-skills are not just applicable to securing the marks needed for post-secondary, but will also positively affect students in their career-advancement objectives. While universities valuing extracurriculars and volunteer hours have been a recent and well-documented trend, some programs still only examine an applicant’s marks, and academic performance is still a major factor in all admissions.

4) Provincial Exams

Until June 2016, BC high school students were expected to write five provincial exams: Math 10, Science 10, English 10, Social Studies 11 and English 12. Under the jurisdiction of the BC Liberals, these exams were scrapped and at the time replaced with one math and one English assessment to be completed between Grade 10 and Grade 12. 

As of today, students must complete three provincial assessments: the Graduation Numeracy Assessment (GNA), administered in Grade 10, and two Graduation Literacy Assessments (GLA) administered in Grade 10 and 12. These assessments were implemented in the school years of 2017/2018, 2019/20, and 2021/22.

While it is unclear which exams the Conservatives are referencing, they plan to  “reinstate standardized provincial exams for Grade 10 and 12 students, providing consistent measurement of student and school achievement,” as highlighted in their educational platform. 

Since the Conservatives do not provide examples of how these exams will impact students' class marks, The Nest will draw on the past structure of exams. 

Before the original provincial exams were scrapped in 2016, they were worth “40 percent of a student’s mark in English and 20 percent in the other subjects,” according to The Vancouver Sun.  Although it is advisable to standardize the curriculum to ensure students are prepared with the same skills, exams of this format do not provide students with enriched or advanced learning material. Weighing a student’s class grade alongside their mark on the exam discourages cumulative learning, as it puts a major amount of importance on the students performance on the exam, leaving little margin for error. 

What the Conservatives do outline in their platform is the promise that exams will measure and compare different school’s academic achievement levels. The Conservatives have not expressed intentions of awarding additional funding to the lower ranking schools to help them improve, nor have they indicated any plans to implement or study the methods used by higher ranking schools. 

Overall, if this is the only stated objective of the exams, they are purposeless, and a waste of valuable time and effort that could be put into other pressing education issues. Unless the party suddenly releases a concrete action plan on the subject, the reinstatement of these exams should remain a low priority issue for whichever party makes it into office.

5) Supporting Children with Disabilities 

One of the NDP’s campaign commitments is to work with teachers to identify students who are struggling early, and expand services and interventions for kids with dyslexia and other learning differences.

During their last term, the NDP invested $30 million to fund universal screenings of dyslexia for over 150,000 students in kindergarten to Grade 3. 

Additionally, in October 2021, the NDP announced their plan to phase out individual funding support for children with autism and create “one stop connection hubs” for BC residents to receive disability services from birth to age 19, with no diagnosis needed.

Under BC’s current system of support, families with children under age six who have an autism diagnosis are eligible to receive $22,000 a year, while older children with the same needs can receive an annual fund of $6,000. The NDP argued that the change would help more than 8,300 children who were being overlooked by the system. 

In April of 2022, the advocacy group AutismBC conducted a survey of 1,563 parents and primary caregivers of children with autism. They found that less than 4 per cent of respondents actually wanted the “one stop connection hubs” outlined in the NDP’s plan. 

Additionally, the survey concluded that 59 per cent of caregivers preferred the current support model, while 27 per cent of respondents would like a hybrid model of the current system and the NDP’s proposed plans. 

The NDP’s original plan was to open 40 “Family Connection Centres” around the province, beginning in 2024. However, after significant criticism, they paused the rollout of the plan in November 2022, with the exception of four pilot centres in Kitimat, Kelowna, Haida Gwaii, and Stikine, which were set to open in 2023. 

The Children's Autism Federation of BC (CAFBC) launched a survey in 2023 asking families to share their experiences with their neighbourhood’s pilot Family Connection Centre location. According to the survey, parents thought that their centre was under-staffed and many parents were unable to receive proper services. 

On the other hand, the Conservative’s promise to restore funding for caregivers of children with autism, which they say was “canceled in four communities so Eby could ‘pilot’ a radical plan that parents didn’t ask for,” and they would “never force families into a one-size-fits-all model.“

The NDP’s plan was created without knowledge or care for what autism caregivers actually wanted. Although the NDP eventually reversed their original plan, they still chose to move forward with a deeply flawed pilot program that failed to provide sufficient care. 

The Conservatives also promised to speed up the development of new independent Inclusive Education Schools, which currently provide education for students with autism and other special needs. No further details were provided for how exactly this will be accomplished.

The Conservatives say they will hire more support workers to lower the current 18–24 month wait time for learning disability assessments. However, they have failed to provide further details, such as how many support workers they plan to hire and how much it will all cost. 

The Nest believes that this commitment by the Conservatives is a promise that could address significant issues. However, the absence of details in their policies highlights a lack of knowledge of how they will implement their plans in the future. Until the Conservatives provide a structured plan for their policies, they will remain unrealistic. 

6) Gifted Programs

This January, intake was paused at the University Transition Program (UTP), due to concerns regarding the mental health of students. The UTP condenses the traditional five-year curriculum of high school to two-years, allowing students as young as 14 to proceed directly to studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). 

Parents received a statement from the Vancouver School Board (VSB) detailing that student intake for the program had been suspended for the coming school year “to allow time for completion of the program review and examination of recommended changes.” These recommendations – on concerns regarding mental health – will be made by Deetken Insight, a business consultation firm, in an external review. 

In April, The Nest reached out to the Ministry of Education and Child Care to gain more clarity on the decision-making behind the intake pause. The Ministry’s official response was that the decision was a joint one, made by the ministry, the VSB and UBC. 

In this response, the ministry also explained that the UTP is a program funded by the Ministry of Education and Child Care, and the host district, presided over by the VSB, is responsible for staffing and administrative oversight.

The BC Conservatives state in their platform that they will “restore the transition program for Gifted Children”, that they claim was “cancelled by Eby earlier this year.” There has been no public statement by Premier Eby regarding the intake pause.

The BC NDP’s platform has a lack of policies regarding gifted education. The Conservatives, on the other hand, plan to restore the Transition program, and expand programs and support for academically gifted students. The Nest has been a long time supporter of resources and programs built with gifted students in mind. With the VSB’s suspension of honours programs and restructuring of the Multi Age Cluster Class (MACC) program due to issues with “inclusivity,” students in search of academic enrichment are finding their options at an all time low. We believe that opportunities for provincially administered gifted education will promote equitable access across districts.

7) Mental Health Support for Youth 

In their campaign platform, the NDP commits to placing a mental health counselor into every public school in BC, in order to provide BC students with the mental health support they need. However, their plan does not include further details as to how counselors will be hired or how much it will cost. 

According to a statement from the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), the average ratio of students to school counselors in North America is 250 to 1. The ratio is 693 to 1 in BC. BC schools significantly lack counselors compared to other schools across North America. The NDP policy provides a much-needed solution to this severe staffing shortage. 

The BCTF also reported that there are currently 1,040 full-time equivalency counselors across all public schools, and approximately 450 more need to be hired for the NDP to achieve their goal. 

Additionally, according to WorkBC, the average annual salary of a school counselor is $83,653. Therefore, The Nest estimates that this policy could cost the NDP an approximate $37 million yearly. However, the NDP has no plan to pay for this expense, nor do they provide their own estimated yearly cost on their platform. 

Although the NDP provides a solution to a significant issue, they provide zero details as to how they plan to hire 450 more counselors with proper credentials and where they will find the funds to do so. The NDP’s policy lacks proper foresight into how they plan to implement their strategy; it is weak and underdeveloped. 

On the other hand, the Conservatives have also committed to expanding early mental health intervention in schools, which they believe is a vital part of improving children and adolescents' long-term mental health. On their platform, they promise to “work to ensure schools have improved access to mental health professionals,” adding that “investing in mental wellness for our youth is investing in a healthier future.” However, they provide zero further context or details for how they plan to reach this goal. 

Although the NDP’s plan of action has many logistical holes, the Conservatives propose zero plans of action to reach their goal. The NDP’s policy may be unfinished, but all the Conservatives have offered is an empty promise. At the end of the day, concepts of a plan are better than no plan at all.