Today most provincial school systems across Canada profess to be committed to “inclusive education” when it comes to serving and supporting children and teens with learning challenges and complex special needs. A big shift has transpired in what was, until a couple of decades ago, referred to as special education services. With the vast majority of physically-challenged students fully integrated into the mainstream, accommodating more students with intellectual and behavioural disabilities in regular classrooms now absorbs the energies of ministries of education and regional school authorities.
Achieving truly inclusive education continues to bedevil provincial systems, especially in the wake of the massive COVID-19 pandemic disruption. One of the most shocking revelations came in New Brunswick where provincial authorities have mandated that all students be served in their regular public school classrooms. In late May 2024, Child and Youth Advocate Kelly Lamrock stunned observers with a stinging report, “Giving Up on Kids.” It literally shattered the province’s reputation for implementing all-inclusive classrooms and sparked parent advocates, child welfare agencies, and the media in one province after another to delve into the sheer numbers of children now out-of-school or on “partial day or partial week plans.”
Lamrock’s report ripped the lid off the problem. Empty school desks, partial day attendance plans, and seclusion rooms are undermining the credibility of inclusive education in our K-12 schools. Best of intentions initiatives promoted by the national advocacy network Inclusive Education Canada, embracing human rights-infused inclusive policy frameworks, and based upon the total inclusion classroom, are coming up considerably short. Far too many struggling students with complex needs are being left out and left behind in provincial school systems.
Backpacks and jackets belonging to students are seen outside an elementary school classroom in Vancouver, B.C., April 13, 2023. Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press.
Big shift: from special education to inclusive classrooms
Thirty years ago, the modern conception of inclusive education was born at a UNESCO World Conference on Special Needs Education held in Spain and captured in what is known as the Salamanca Declaration. “Every learner matters and matters equally” is the guiding principle, and that has meant including most students, if not all, in mainstream classrooms.
Since 1995, school systems across Canada and many around the world have shifted in their approach to serving learning-challenged kids, from providing special education support programs to including more children in inclusive learning environments. While the principle is nearly universally accepted, few nations or states followed New Brunswick in virtually eliminating specialized support programs for children with severe learning challenges and complex needs.
Illusion of inclusion: giving up on kids
Lamrock’s report revealed that in New Brunswick, increasing numbers of vulnerable and hard-to-manage kids were being sent home and, in some cases, with “no educational services at all.” While the practice was once relatively rare, Lamrock reported that today more than 500 children were being denied an education for most of the week, some 344 of whom were on partial-day programs in the province’s four Anglophone school districts.
Under current, de-facto policy, students who posed the greatest challenges essentially disappeared with no additional services and little in the form of alternative learning strategies. Even more disconcerting, there was no evidence that districts were tracking the impact of partial days on the children or monitoring their progress.
Resorting to “partial day or week plans,” according to Lamrock, was making a mockery of New Brunswick’s much trumpeted inclusive classroom model. In his words: “It is a policy of giving up on the children most in need.” Most disconcerting of all, children in care are nearly 20 times more likely to wind up on partial days and be told not to come to school.
The implementation gap in inclusive education is now a canyon in Canada’s schools, most evident in a recent wave of alarming and interwoven CBC News reports. This much is clear: Giving up on vulnerable kids is now more common. Inclusive classroom advocacy is riddled with confusion. In the wake of the pandemic crisis, the explosion of children with learning challenges and more disruptive classrooms have made it next to impossible to accommodate everyone’s needs.
Inclusive education reforms aimed at accommodating the full range of students have encountered formidable implementation obstacles, judging from a deeper dive into the continuing challenges in Alberta and Nova Scotia, as well as in Prince Edward Island, the latest province grappling with a rise in the numbers attending irregularly or not at all.
A woman walks her daughter to school in Gatineau, Que., Monday May 11, 2020. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press.
Inclusion stress test in Alberta
Alberta stands out as a Canadian province committed to supporting the transition to inclusive education. Over the past two decades, it has embraced a strategy more in line with leading North American education authorities. A guiding Alberta Education document, “Setting the Direction Framework” (2010), made a clear commitment to developing a transition plan, and the Alberta Teachers Association produced a September 2014 report “Inclusive Education in Alberta Schools” showing the way. The latest iteration, “Implementing a Continuum of Services” (2022), aims to tackle and address the problem of class composition and the critical need for a more flexible responsive continuum of supports for learning-challenged children.
Theory and practice are two different things when it comes to that transformation. Maintaining an inclusive education system and calm, productive classrooms in Alberta has come to depend upon the use of extraordinary measures. Since students returned to regular classrooms after COVID-19, removing children from classes for time-outs or partial days has significantly risen.
Seclusion rooms, a dedicated area in a school intended to provide a quiet and supervised space for a student who poses an imminent danger to themselves or others, were banned in Alberta in 2018 by the New Democratic Party government, but with the support of parents and teachers were reintroduced in 2019 after the Jason Kenney UCP government took power.
Removing students for disrupting classes or interfering with the learning of others became more common. In the 2019-20 school year, a ministerial order was introduced to regulate seclusion rooms and began tracking data. The rooms were used nearly 5,000 times that year, even though schools were out from April to June 2020. The following year, 2021-22, seclusion rooms were used 6,059 times across Alberta.
While the stated provincial goal has been to reduce the use of seclusion rooms, it’s not happening. In June 2024, CBC News reported that Edmonton Public Schools were planning to build 25 more seclusion rooms in the face of a promise to phase out the spaces. By September 2024, some 192 of the city’s 214 public schools will have such rooms, albeit intended to be used only in a crisis when a student’s behaviour presents a risk to themselves or others.
So many classroom crises are erupting that parent advocates are asking why and looking for better alternatives. “Every day that this keeps happening, there’s kids who are going to be paying for this for the rest of their lives,” said Edmonton parent Sarah Doll, the mother of two children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
Teachers Shelley Manthorne and Julie Jebailey work with young students at Joseph Howe Elementary in Halifax on Thursday, March 31, 2016. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press.
Rough transition in Nova Scotia
Markedly similar concerns about holes in inclusive education have arisen in Nova Scotia. An informal survey of a dozen Nova Scotia parents conducted in June 2024 by CBC News revealed that most had “removed their children” from public schools when they found the local school “not prepared to support” kids with disabilities and complex needs. Most children on the autism spectrum found schools unable to provide one-on-one supports and accommodations.
The Nova Scotia model, proposed in the 2018 Commission on Inclusive Education “Students First” report (Njie, Shea & Williams, 2018 ), promised a transformation driven by a $60-million multi-year investment in hundreds of new hires. While an initial study of implementation (2019-2020) was limited in scope and focused entirely on the process of implementation, it did unearth a whole thicket of complications.
Forward momentum was completely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, just as some staff were being hired and everyone was adjusting to new or reassigned roles. Classroom teachers were anxious about being expected to teach all students in their classrooms. The shifting of roles and job descriptions of teachers, specialists, and education assistants was fraught with overlap and confusion. Radically increasing staffing without proper coordination or training may have added to the problems. No further departmental review was ever shared with the public.
Service gaps in Prince Edward Island
Over on Prince Edward Island, inclusive education is soon to arrive and a provincial consultation just concluded to finalize a policy framework and implementation plan. A November 2023 review report, “Better Together,” produced by in-house provincial autism consultant Raeanne Adams, is recommending the transition to a multi-tiered system of support model, modeled after that of Alberta. It’s heavily influenced by the research and advocacy of two Alberta consultants, Kurtis and Lorna Hewson, co-authors of “Collaborative Response” (2023), a guide to implementing a continuum of supports.
Serious concerns are surfacing on the Island, and the proposed changes cannot come soon enough, especially for parent advocates for inclusion. With the incidence of autism now one out of every 50 live births, schools in P.E.I. are struggling to cope with rising numbers of children with complex needs.
Prodded by former provincial cabinet minister, retired educational assistant, and grandmother of a boy with autism, Paula Biggar, the province is becoming more open and transparent with data. During the week of June 1-6, 2024, some 24 students were reportedly on a reduced schedule, defined as being out of school for one hour or more a day, and another 19 were not attending any school at all.
P.E.I.’s child and youth advocate, Marvin Bernstein, has identified partial day attendance as an emergent problem. Like his N.B. counterpart, he’s hearing about a growing number of parents whose children have autism and other complex needs and who aren’t attending school full time, or at all, for weeks or months at a time.
Some frustrated P.E.I. parents have become so concerned that they pulled their own children from school; school officials, in other cases, have made the decision after running into challenges managing students’ behaviour. According to Bernstein, there’s no real justification for removing such students.
“Clearly, in my mind, rights are being violated,” he told CBC News. “Surely the onus should be on the school authority to develop a plan that will be able to accommodate that student.”
What’s gone wrong?
Partial day attendance is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Adopting inclusive education philosophy and over-arching policy frameworks are no real substitute for actually implementing inclusive practices at the school level. One of the world’s leading proponents, Mel Ainscow, author of Developing Inclusive Schools (2024) remains clear-eyed and sees the contending pressures, holes, contradictions, and unintended side-effects.
Maintaining the New Brunswick model based upon all-inclusive classrooms comes at a steep price because hundreds of the most challenged, vulnerable, and troubled kids are being excluded for days and weeks at a time, just to maintain the fidelity of the model. Successfully implementing the alternative, a multi-tiered system of support, in other provinces, with alternative placement options, remains a work in progress.
One prime example of the formidable implementation obstacles is Nova Scotia where the 2018 inclusive education plan is faltering, according to the June 2024 auditor general’s report delving into school violence and disruptive classrooms. Investing heavily in staffing up, the number of teaching assistant positions rose from 1,772 in 2016-17 to 2,636 in 2022-23 (or an increase of 49 percent) and learning resource teachers grew from 902 in 2016-17 to 1,034 in 2022-23. Nothing much changed in the workplace because “over the past seven years educators are still experiencing similar challenges.”
What’s abundantly clear in most provinces is that fully inclusive classrooms have become unattainable, especially in the wake of the pandemic crisis. Speaking on a June 2024 Inclusive Education Canada webinar, Child Advocate Kelly Lamrock cited the two key reasons: the incredible challenges of teaching and managing today’s complex classrooms and the lack of sufficient and sustained resource support to make that transition. Pandemic education fallout in the form of persistent learning gaps, child mental health issues, social media addiction, and disruptive classrooms has all made matters worse.
Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D., is Senior Fellow, Education Policy, Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He’s based in Halifax, NS, where he serves as Director, Schoolhouse Institute, Adjunct Professor of Education, Saint Mary’s University, and Chair of researchED Canada.
