Education: True impact of teachers’ strikes won’t be known until 2025, says Drainville

We won’t really know the impact of teachers’ strikes on student success until 2025, Education Minister Bernard Drainville said on Wednesday.

He was responding to questions from Liberal MNA Madwa-Nika Cadet on the effectiveness of the remedial education plan during a study of the Ministry of Education’s budgetary appropriations.

According to the most recent data, 483,751 interventions have been carried out with students since the end of January in all Quebec schools. For example, 175,001 students have benefited from tutoring services.

However, we must not “declare victory too quickly”, Minister Drainville acknowledged in the National Assembly. According to him, the effectiveness of the support measures can only really be measured at the beginning of 2025.

To take stock of the situation, they will first have to take note of the report card results, then look at the number of enrolments in summer courses, and finally consider the marks obtained in the ministerial exams in January.

“It’s still too early to measure the effects, the after-effects of the strikes, but we know that there were some,” said Drainville. “It’s possible that we won’t be able to measure the full impact of the strikes until early 2025.”

“When we arrive at this assessment, what we want is to be able to see that the strikes have had as little adverse impact as possible, at which point we will be able to say that the catch-up plan has achieved its results,” he added.

Students affected by the strike by the Fédération Autonome de l’Enseignement (FAE) last Fall missed around a month of school. The Common Front strike lasted eight days.

In public secondary schools, 32 per cent of students have an individualized education plan because they have special needs. The dropout rate in the public sector is 18.2 per cent, compared with 8.2 per cent in the private sector.

Cadet also expressed concern about the teaching profession, pointing out that during the strikes between 21 November 2023, and 11 January 2024, at least 263 teachers, 56 professionals, and 599 support staff resigned.

“Let’s be careful,” reacted Bernard Drainville, pointing out that 263 resigning teachers corresponds to only 0.0015 per cent of the 165,000 teachers in the province.

However, the Minister acknowledged that he was facing “immense” manpower challenges. Given the scale of the challenge, he warned that more teachers who are not legally qualified could find themselves in front of a classroom next year.

The number of non-legally qualified teachers has risen by 76 per cent in three years. Drainville said that he could not “rule out” the possibility of even more teachers next year.

Wednesday’s review of the Ministry of Education’s appropriations also revealed that 14 per cent of the 593 complaints made to the Protecteur National de l’Élève in the last eight months concerned sexual violence.

In addition, a shoulder-to-shoulder meeting organized last August between senior ministry officials and the directors-general of the school service centres on the theme of “cohesion” and “reconciliation” cost taxpayers $8,000.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews