Today, Premier Doug Ford and Lisa Thompson, Minister of Education, announced their parental consultation into Ontario's curriculum.
Starting in September 2018, the Government will engage in province-wide public consultations that will include an online survey, telephone town halls in every region of Ontario, and a submission platform that will allow interested individuals and groups to present detailed proposals to the Ministry.
The consultation will include:
- How to improve student performance in the STEM disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math;
- How our schools are preparing students with needed job skills, whether it be by exposing them to opportunities in the skilled trades or giving them the opportunity to improve their skills in increasingly important fields like coding;
- What more can be done to ensure students graduate with important life skills like financial literacy;
- How to build a new age-appropriate Health and Physical Education curriculum that includes subjects like mental health, sex-ed, and legalization of cannabis;
- What measures can be taken to improve standardized testing; and
- What steps schools should take to ban cellphone use in the classroom.
"We expect and look forward to a robust discussion on each of these items - and this input will be used to shape our decisions for the 2019-2020 school year," said Thompson.
The Government will also begin drafting a Ministry of Education Parents' Bill of Rights. Parents will be asked what elements they want to see included in the Bill of Rights as part of the province-wide consultation.
In addition, the Minister of Education announced she would use her authority under the Ontario College of Teachers Act to strike a Public Interest Committee that will help inform the creation of the Parents' Bill of Rights while ensuring curriculum-based misconduct issues are fairly dealt with at the college. The government is launching a dedicated submission platform — Fortheparents.ca — that parents can use to report any concerns.
