The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government has invested “substantially” in education since coming to power. Annual spending per student has seen “remarkable growth,” and there has been an increase in the number of staff providing services to students since 2018.
But are the results there? That’s what the Institut du Québec tried to assess in its study on the effects of investments in education from 2018 to 2024. And its conclusion is nuanced.
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“Quebec government spending on education has increased substantially since the CAQ came to power, rising from $14.9 billion in 2018 to $23.4 billion in 2024. This represents an average annual growth of 7.8 per cent, well above inflation during this period (3.4 per cent).”
The increase can be explained by several factors, including immigration and 4-year-old kindergartens, but spending per student has also grown, by 43 per cent from 2018 to 2024.
The Institute uses data from Statistics Canada. “Before 2018, Quebec spent slightly less per student than the Canadian average. However, this difference remains too small to conclude that education is truly underfunded. This situation has, however, been completely reversed by the rapid growth in spending over the past few years. So much so that in 2022 (the most recent data available), spending per student in Quebec was 23 per cent higher than the Canadian average.”
“There has really been an improvement in services, and an improvement in services that contrasts with what we see elsewhere in Canada,” commented Emna Braham, President and CEO of the Institut du Québec, in an interview.
This is explained, among other things, by clauses that were negotiated by education unions, such as the addition of classroom aids, the addition of specialized professional services, and the recruitment of many teachers.
The Institute points out, however, that many of these hastily recruited teachers lack the required qualifications for properly trained teachers. “The limited data available indicates that more than a quarter of the teachers who worked in the system in 2020 were not legally qualified.”
Challenges and unknowns
As for the results of these substantial investments in education since 2018, they are contradictory: Quebec is still lagging behind in terms of graduation rates, but it continues to do well in literacy and numeracy on an international scale.
“Even though we often portrayed a network in crisis, we are managing to achieve several of the fundamental objectives of our educational network,” emphasizes Ms. Braham.
And with the announced spending restrictions, the network will undergo a transformation. “While spending has increased very rapidly in recent years, it is now expected to grow by only 1.6 per cent per year on average until 2027.”
The Institute is questioning how the public network will be able to manage everything, since several expenses are difficult to reduce, such as salaries and teaching positions.
“Ultimately, there isn’t much room for maneuver to slow the growth of spending. There’s the fact that the number of students is expected to stagnate over the next few years; it will stop increasing, so that will ease the pressure somewhat. But we know that the needs per student are very significant. So, the challenge lies in the complexity and feasibility of reducing spending as much as we’ve planned,” concludes Braham.
“And then there’s the question of what the impacts of such a slowdown in spending will be. What our analyses show is that, given that the bulk of the spending has gone towards staff recruitment, which is at the service of students, it seems difficult to slow the growth of spending without affecting student services.”
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
