Thank you, Madam Chairperson. I will just start over so the Ministers will have the benefit of what I was saying. Madam Chairperson, as I was saying, we have received a lot of complaints from the general public that the programs from one region to the next are not consistent. Perhaps because the larger communities are able to use a greater budget that they can offer more courses, a greater variety of courses and that type of thing. Sometimes when children move from one region, particularly from a smaller community to a larger community they find that their children, for instance, are supposed to be in grade 7 when they reach that larger community in a larger school and they have to get readjusted to a larger school and the rest of that, they find that the child is not at the actual grade 7 level that they are teaching in the larger community. I have heard that myself from several people who moved to Yellowknife and they were very disappointed when their child was starting school and very quickly found out that even though they had been doing quite well in the school that they had come from that they were actually at a lower level.
Although we are talking about grade 11 core subjects in this motion, you could use grade 11 as well in my example and that is what is being complained of. Madam Chairperson, we have asked the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment on many occasions if the grade 12 courses are consistent across the Northwest Territories and he says, well, yes, because the grade 12 core courses have what are called departmental examinations and these departmental examinations are all exactly the same. For instance, if you take Math 30 in Hay River or if you take Math 30 in Inuvik or in Yellowknife, or Fort Smith for that matter. No matter where you take grade 12 math, Math 30, those students will all have to write the same departmental examination and those departmental examinations account for 50 percent of the mark and this is how the department rationalizes that there is consistency in the grade 12 curriculum and the way that it is taught across the Northwest Territories. Madam Chairperson, recognizing that the department feels that this an effective method of guaranteeing consistency in the core subjects of grade 12, our committee felt that the best way to ensure consistency with the grade 11 core subjects would be to institute a similar type of departmental examinations for those grade 11 subjects, math, social studies and the sciences.
We know that the departmental examinations for grade 12 are not actually developed by the Department of Education, Culture and Employment. They are actually developed in Alberta. Our Department of Education distributes those examinations to all the schools where grade 12 is taught and our students write those examinations, of course, with our teachers supervising. What would be needed, Madam Chairperson, to implement these departmental examinations for the grade 11 core subjects in the Northwest Territories, the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, of which Mr. Dent who is now the Finance Minister and the current Minister is Mr. Miltenberger, what would be required is that the department would have to develop these departmental examinations for the Northwest Territories.
While we would not actually be able to compare or to say it that is consistent with the Alberta curriculum, unless we based our examinations on the Alberta curriculum. We could ensure that all the students in the grade 11 core subjects that their education is consistent, that they are all taking and learning and do know the basic things that they are supposed to be taught in those subjects. Madam Chairperson, this was the reasoning of the committee. I am sure that if the other Members who are not here, would have not been able to attend today for constituency reasons, I am sure that if they were here they would also vote in favour of this motion as I wish, I hope my other colleagues from Yellowknife South, Yellowknife Centre and North Slave are all going to vote in favour of this motion as well. With that I would like to thank the chair for allowing me to speak on this committee motion. Thank you.