Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One of the things that I had on my list was the standardization question, and Mr. Bell has covered a lot of them already. But this is something that has been on my mind, as well, and it has to do with standardization or just knowing where our children are at qualitatively. Not just quantitatively, not just is our child in grades 3, 6 and 9, and where are they in Grade 6. If they're in high school, maybe the marks that they're getting in Biology 30 or 33, or Math 30 might tell us something. But there is a question about kids who are being pushed through or put through, because that's the trend.
Before I go on, I just want to qualify by saying that I want to acknowledge a lot of good work is being done by the department. We're sitting here and you're listening to two hours of people talking about what's wrong, and that's not to say that there aren't a lot of good things going on. I think that Minister Ootes has been overseeing this department at a very good time, because he's been getting lots of money to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. I know that he's working hard and the department is working hard, and it is generally a good news department, as far as education in the public's eyes goes. So I felt compelled to add that.
But there is always the question of whether we are doing the best we can with the money. I get people coming in and parents coming in and saying my kid is in Grade 12 or Grade 10, and you may just get 50 percent of everything and get through, but then maybe you only need 50 percent to pass. But when you're seeing cases where kids are graduating Grade 12 or whatever, but they're really reading at grades 5 or 6 levels, there's our anecdotal evidence. I don't know if that's the prevalent trend, I have no idea.
But we also know that we have a private company providing the most money on literacy programs. We know that looking at what's going on, that we have students graduating without adequate literacy and numeracy levels. I don't think it's unique to the North. I remember being in university where kids getting accepted into university did not have the levels of writing or reading that you would expect in university. So it's a trend that I think is detected everywhere in Canada about the quality of education that we're providing, and what sort of education they're receiving in general. But in the North specifically, we don't have a whole lot of students. We are a very small population, too. I guess we have fewer people working to keep tabs on that, too.
I remember asking the Minister lots of questions about our labour force, because we need to know how many people are there, who's workable, who's employable, who's not, who's in the hospital, who's in jail, who's in school. You know, what is the employable population so that the government can make a decision about how we get ready for what is the target of the population that we're working on and so on. Eventually the Minister came up with lots of information on that. So this is the kind of information we need to know. This parent in this anecdotal evidence had to pursue for a long time to get her child tested, and then she discovered her child was reading at a very, very low level. This child had no problem passing all the way to Grade 12. People don't want to hear about that, but we need to know that.
Another evidence I know is that if you talk to any principal in any school, he or she could give you a pretty good idea about where their students lie. I think every teacher knows when they get their students, 20 or 25 kids at the beginning of the year, they watch them for a while, they study them and they know which kids have behavioral problems, which kids may have FAS/FAE, which kids may have a reading problem. I'm sure the information is out there. I don't know if we need more scientific evidence to show that. But definitely that's an area of concern to me, and it goes in particular to those with special needs. I can't believe when we always talk about the need for additional funding, we don't even have a standardized program on how we fund our special needs funding. We know that we budgeted 15 percent and we give it to the boards, and then it's really frustrating for us to say we have increased special needs funding. Then the parents will come up and say nothing has changed. Every parent has to fight every year at the beginning of the year to get programs for their children with special needs, especially when their kids are going to the same school and they know about it, but still they have to fight all over again to make sure that they get the assistance they need, or they have the right special assistance education and so on. So there is a lack of even a special needs funding policy throughout the territory.
I remember I asked the Minister a while back about how you fund the school board. When you give them 15 percent of the total budget for special needs, what do you ask them to do? Is there a standard that the department provides? The document I got was a policy statement on inclusionary schooling. That's the policy, and it was a photocopy of something from years back. I was really quite surprised. I see that there is no policy statement from the government. I think in departments like Health or Education, where you're working through the boards, the essential role of the government and the department as an essential body is to establish policy or standards to make sure that the money is being spent the way you want it to, and also that you're able to report back to the House about where it went.
Also I think if it is the case that 50 percent of our children are going to need special needs funding or special needs assistance or something, we have to get ready for that. We may have to create a program to train more special needs assistants at Aurora College. The need is at the other extreme, too. I talked to parents in Range Lake North School, for example, where students need special needs assistants to read, or they may have a clinical diagnosis that needs special needs, or some kids just might need help with reading or numeracy or something, then you have kids who are gifted. There are other kids at the other end of special needs who need other attention as well.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should ask the Minister and the department about whether there is someone or a section in the department that administers and sets standards on how the special needs funding, that 15 percent of the total budget, goes to school boards, and how do you check to see what happens to that 15 percent special needs funding?