Province accepts recommendations on improving anglophone school system | CBC News

The Higgs government says it is accepting a series of recommendations designed to improve learning in the province’s anglophone school system, including a potentially new approach to classroom composition.

The province should try to “balance” class sizes so that schools can still support students with extra learning needs while minimizing the potential disruptions for other students, says the report released Thursday.

The report also urges a rethinking of the approach to “moving students forward” to the next grade level “without the necessary foundational skills” — something that requires “holding students accountable by establishing clear expectations and boundaries.”

Education Minister Bill Hogan said the department will develop a plan by March 31, 2024, to implement the recommendations.

“Today I am pleased to accept all of the recommendations from the steering committee that will build on the efforts already underway to improve the anglophone education system,” he said.

WATCH | The problems aren’t new, but teachers think it might be different this time: 

Why public momentum might be exactly what the anglophone school system needs

Featured VideoNew Brunswick’s Education Department has unveiled recommendations to improve the anglophone school sector over the next five years.

The steering committee that drafted the report, which included education officials and the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association, was established in April after the government scrapped a controversial plan to replace French immersion.

Hundreds of people attended public meetings last winter to support immersion and to argue that some of the problems blamed on the program could be addressed without getting rid of it.

One reason for rethinking immersion was the so-called “streaming” effect — students with learning challenges being concentrated in non-immersion classes, creating a difficult learning environment.

Class composition

Hogan acknowledged what the report points out: that maximum class sizes, written into teachers’ union contracts, deprive the province of the flexibility to create smaller classes of students with extra needs — because that would mean larger classes of other students.

“I don’t have the answers. That’s part of the implementation committee, to come up with some potential solutions for that,” he said.

“There are areas where we can reduce the number of students that have higher needs and give them greater support in a class, where we could put students that have lesser needs and can achieve better, academically, in a larger class.”

‘Social promotion’

Hogan also agreed that it’s important to revisit “social promotion” — passing students into the next grade level for developmental reasons even if their marks fall short. 

“We do want to make sure that our students are learning the subject material and are prepared to proceed to the next grade, and they’re not missing a fundamental piece of a subject area that’s just going to complicate it further as they continue on,” he said.

Steering committee member Ardith Shirley, executive director of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association, acknowledged that many of the problems identified in the report have existed for a long time. 

She said she was hopeful that the public interest — and the emotion shown by parents – during the immersion controversy will provide the momentum to ensure the changes happen.

“Long-term means it does have to take us through the next five years. So do we have the momentum in New Brunswick to take that, and keep that path forward, to actually see them come to fruition?” she said.

“That’s the part that I think may be different this time.”

Thursday’s report indicates that French immersion will continue, despite Premier Blaine Higgs’s frequent complaints that the program wasn’t graduating enough fluently bilingual students and was not available to all students in the province.

It calls for “greater flexibility” than the current Grade 1 and Grade 6 entry points, so that students moving to the province — or those moving from a school where immersion wasn’t offered to one where it is — can take up the program at any grade level.

More concrete details needed, say Liberals, Greens

Opposition leaders said the ideas sounded good but were too vague to put much faith in.

Both Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Leader David Coon said action on classroom composition has been promised before.

“We will be looking forward to hearing what that means tangibly, and whether they will deliver what looks like interesting bullets on a page,” Holt said.

Coon said that “so far I haven’t seen any concrete measures or recommendations about how you would do that.… 

“What we’re dealing with at this point is very high-level themes, for the most part.”

The report is the second by the steering committee.

In July it issued shorter-term recommendations including the hiring of behavioural mentors and more literacy and numeracy teachers in kindergarten and elementary schools.

Hogan said Thursday those numbers have increased this year but he didn’t provide specifics.

Other recommendations in the new report include:

• Developing a province-wide plan to address “chronic absenteeism” in schools.

• Using technology to allow more personalized learning.

• Adding 30 minutes of physical education per day to the school day from kindergarten to Grade 8.

• Improving the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers and specialized health professionals such as psychologists, speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists in the school system.

• Providing more training and professional development for educational assistants.

• Helping teachers who teach reading at early grade levels get specific training to “maximize” the progress of those students.

• Ensuring equal access to professional development for teachers in both English prime and immersion classrooms who teach students with extra challenges.