Province accepts recommendations on improving anglophone school system

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.

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.

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."

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.