Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member has raised a lot of important issues and it will take me some time to address them. Inclusionary schooling is an idea where we say that everybody deserves an opportunity to be in a regular classroom, and the goal is to keep young people together by age grouping and working with them to realize their skills to the best of their abilities so that they can progress. It's a program that has had tremendous success I think in the Northwest Territories. I know just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to some people in the Territories who are right now very active in working with people who have challenges, and they say that the young people that they are seeing now who have come through the school system are functioning at a much higher level than what they used to see 20 years ago when everybody didn't necessarily get the opportunity to go through the regular program. They also pointed out that many young people of the same age are much more comfortable working with people who have challenges. So they've seen a benefit to the inclusionary system through that over the years.
One of the other issues the Member talked about was the issue of social promotion or social passing, which is where you are not dealing with challenges that you might otherwise have; for instance, autism or other behavioural problems. But a child who may not be able to perform at the same level as other kids in their class is kept together with that class grouping and that's something that isn't new in theory. It's been around for quite some time. It has been used, more or less, over a number of years this century, depending on the philosophy of the area in which you are watching the school. So in some places in North America, it's been used consistently for a long, long time. In other places, it's almost like a pendulum, they have swung from social promotion to failure, to social promotion to failure in case of not meeting standards. So it's not something that has been consistent.
In the Northwest Territories, the divisional educational councils have a final say as to which method they should use in the region, and the current understanding or the current sort of idea of what is best in the education system right now favours social promotion and keeping kids together with their same age grouping. If a child has failed because they are not successful, it often puts them into a situation where they have failed forever because they don't ever get a chance to get back in with their age group. I think if you think back to when you were a kid in school, there weren't many times that most of us would associate with younger kids, and that's one of the factors that tends to drive kids away from school: forcing them to stick around with younger kids.
In a lot of the work that has been done, the studies show that kids that are held back don't go on to graduate. So it is an area that most educators say that the best practice is to keep kids together with their age group. Teachers are taught to deal with different age groups in a classroom or different grade levels in a classroom, different standards. It's not unusual to have kids who read at different levels in a class, and that's always going to be true. You may have kids that can't pass a test, but you'll still have kids who are reading three or four years ahead of others in a classroom, and you'll have some kids that may have challenges in one area or another. I know I can speak from personal experience. I know kids who are struggling with reading at their grade level, but are doing very well in math and science at their grade level. So if you were to say that because they can't pass their tests in literacy and that you should hold them back, then you'd be holding them back when they are capable of moving on in math and science. That just creates a situation where the kids are not motivated to continue in school. So it's an interesting area to discuss, but, as I said, we do leave the issue to the DECs to resolve.
I would be hard pressed to disagree with the Member that we could improve on the situation both for social promotion and for dealing with children with special needs if we had more special needs assistants in the classroom. I think that's a no-brainer. We have, over the past four or
five years, dramatically increased the amount of funding that we've put into special needs and support for special needs in schools across the Northwest Territories. It's gone from just over $6 million to around $16 million in the course of the last five years. We know though, from surveys that have been done, teachers tell us that they think the level of challenge they face in the classroom is far greater than that, and they would tell you that they probably need more than 15 percent support going towards special needs in order to adequately address them. So I can't disagree with the Member that that would improve our ability to deal with those situations.
Talking about the calibre of our graduates, that's a real challenge. I think one of the big issues that we've got here is oftentimes young people, when they make their choices, make them without thinking about where they are going in the future. We need to do a better job of getting parents and kids and counsellors and teachers at the school level involved together early on -- Grade 8, Grade 9 -- to understand the choices that they make in courses will determine what they come out with at the end. All it takes is 100 credits to graduate, and that doesn't mean that everybody who gets a graduation certificate achieves the same level. There's a tremendous difference. You can get a graduation certificate and go off to university or become an apprentice or, in fact, you can go to university without getting a graduation certificate. All the university cares about is the marks you got in specific courses. So graduation certificates just mean that you've gotten 100 credits with some of the courses that are stipulated, and they don't say that you've achieved at a certain level and you're able to carry on from that level into your chosen field if you have a major that you've built up to in the first place. I think that's where we maybe need to put some more emphasis, is making sure that kids understand that if they choose to take a 16-level course instead of a 13-level course, instead of a 10-level or 11-level course, that there are differences and those differences are going to show up at the end of their schooling and will mean that they need more schooling if they change their mind about what they want to do.
One way we're going to help people understand how kids are doing, and help people understand where they should maybe move with some of those choices, is we're bringing in, as I've told Members, the Alberta achievement tests. So in grades 3, 6 and 9 we're going to get a better picture of how our schools are doing and give us a better idea of where we need to strengthen approaches. Is it just counselling, or do we need to go in and strengthen how we deliver literacy programs or how we deliver numeracy programs? These tests will give us a better chance to understand all that.
The other thing that I've directed, is that schools have to start reporting functional grade level. I think a lot of the times parents don't know how well their kids are doing or what level they're functioning at. So we've directed that teachers have to inform the department what the functional grade level is of the students, and we're encouraging them to share that information with their parents as well, so there is a clear understanding when children are facing challenges and then perhaps a better ability to seek out assistance when it's needed. Thank you, Madam Chair.