Our Hopes for Canada’s Education Sector

We have had the privilege of working closely with the education sector for almost a decade. We have done strategic planning, engagement, evaluation, and governance work for school districts, teacher federations, public school employers’ associations, education-focused non-profits, and principal/VP associations. Along the way, we have noticed patterns for what tends to move a district or organization closer to the outcomes it is hoping for, and what tends to hold it back. 

Much of this work involves sitting with tough feedback and constraints, so in this blog, we offer six hopes for the sector based on our insights as a partner. It is our aspiration to keep working with organizations across the sector to bring these hopes to life and we invite you to join us on this journey. 

We hope for students to have a say in defining what success means for them. This means being active participants in charting their own path through the school system, and uncovering what their ambitions are for after they graduate. In our experience, students are very clear and open about what is or isn’t working in their educational experience. We treasure this specificity and believe it deserves more weight in shaping decisions.

We hope for space to hold differences in what parents and caregivers want for students. Some push hard for rigour and career readiness. Others want to see emotional regulation and life skills prioritized in the classroom. One community member shared: “People have very different perspectives on WHAT to prepare students for”. We don't think that tension needs resolving, but rather to be held and explored, with room for more than one answer.

We hope for deep support for educators so they can stay in the work they care about. We have engaged with teachers who have been doing this work for twenty years and are exhausted in a way that is difficult to show in any staffing report. We have heard, more than once, how much the conversation about student mental health forgets to ask about staff mental health. We hope to see the importance of staff support make it into the plans and budgets at a systems level.

We hope for school districts and educational partners to collaborate and work together to serve students better. We have seen glimpses of what that can look like, districts pooling their hiring efforts through a shared recruitment platform, for instance, aimed at a shortage no single district could solve alone. There's more room to build on that kind of collaboration, especially for rural and remote communities that have less capacity to compete for candidates on their own.

We hope for a shift towards strengths-based language, one that's already underway in many communities. Boards are increasingly shifting away from words like "vulnerable" or "struggling," and are reaching for language that focuses on assets. We think that's a great sign. We also think it has to be done carefully, so it doesn't minimize the depth of need that still exists.

We hope for increased trust between communities and the school districts serving them. We have heard skepticism firsthand in communities, questions about spending, priorities, and why decisions get made the way they do. Most of the time, what's missing isn't good intent; it's a shared picture of the constraints everyone is working within.

These hopes aren't ours to deliver on our own, and we don't think they can get resolved in any single strategic plan or engagement process. They build slowly, across many engagements, across many educational partners, over many years. What we will continue to commit to is creating spaces where people feel heard, and helping the plans and decisions that come out of those spaces make a positive difference in communities.

If you're a district leader, look for one more place this year to bring students or educators into decision-making. If you're a teacher or EA, keep naming what you're seeing, and give your own needs the same care and attention you give everyone else's. If you're a student, trust that what you notice matters, and keep sharing it with the peers and adults around you. If you're a caregiver or community member, ask questions, and stay open to the constraints you can't see from where you sit. None of this fixes everything on its own. But each of these, done consistently, closes some of the distance between people trying to do right by students.