Québec solidaire presents bill to create network of free, accessible schools
Posted February 19, 2025 12:58 pm.
Québec solidaire (QS) wants to see public and private schools become part of a common network that would be free and accessible to all.
Co-spokesperson Ruba Ghazal presented Bill 895 on Wednesday, so that all children have access to quality education, regardless of their parents’ income or their academic results.
The bill proposes to bring together public schools and private schools that agree to stop selection based on grades in particular, within a common network. Private schools that choose not to join this network would see their public funding cut.
Furthermore, the legislation would make special projects accessible to all students and would prohibit any process of student selection.
It provides for the same conditions of free education and funding within all schools in the common network.
According to Ghazal, the Quebec school system is “three-speed”: the regular public, the public with special projects and the subsidized private. Students, she says, are sorted “by their report card and their parents’ salary.”
“I dream of another Quebec,” she said in a press release. “A Quebec where parents with lower salaries don’t have to tell their daughter that she won’t be able to do the volleyball concentration.”
In 2016, the defunct Higher Council of Education stated in a report that Quebec schools were the most unequal in the country, an argument taken up by QS on Wednesday.
“The market logic and the “strongest pocket” have no place in schools, denounced QS spokesperson for education, Sol Zanetti. It is time to join forces and have a common school network in order to guarantee equal opportunities for all students.”
Bill 895 is inspired by the plan for a common school network of the citizen group École ensemble presented in 2022.
The three-speed school system is losing popular support in Quebec, according to the results of a CROP survey conducted for École ensemble and published Tuesday.
The proportion of respondents who believe publicly funded schools should not select students based on academic performance was 68 per cent in 2022, compared to 76 per cent in 2024, according to the poll.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
