Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I have to beg the chair's indulgence and make some general comments as we go along here, because I haven't had an opportunity to address the line item that's important to me in the last couple of weeks. Aside from that, I think what was the key to one of my issues that came out of the election was inclusionary schooling, Madam Chair. So I gave it a lot of thought, and it's one of the big issues, of course, with moving our children along, bumping them along without giving them the skills they need. I don't know how the system came to that place. I was trying to understand inclusionary schooling, I thought that was perhaps that, maybe the Minister can correct me if I'm wrong, was about maybe having everybody in school, including the disabled. I don't know if it was meant to move our weaker students along in grade school, because people are graduating and they are literally barely functioning. Their reading and writing skills are very poor as they graduate. Are we graduating them just to graduate them? Are we moving our children through school so that we have a statistical increase in graduate rates and that kind of stuff? Because they really are not functioning at a Grade 12 level when we're graduating them, Madam Chair.
I think some of the issues that were pointed out to me were because we're not spending enough time with our students in the school and it might have something to do with the teacher ratio. Some people even suggested, Madam Chair, that I think we may need more special needs assistants, because our classes are big and they are spending time on the ones that are lagging. So the ones that are keen to go ahead are suffering. So they're thinking if we had more teacher availability, if we organize our resources to where there was another assistant who helps the ones who are struggling get along, perhaps the rest of the balance of the children would have more time from their teacher in their regular class instead of everybody lagging behind.
I don't know if I'm explaining it properly, Madam Chair. We're spending all of our time at the lower end and people aren't really achieving success on the higher end. So that kind of concerns me. How is the Minister going to address it? It has been at the forefront of our Assembly for at least the past year-and-a-half. Thank you.