(Quebec) The Auditor General of Quebec, Guylaine Leclerc, paints a damning finding of the Ministry of Education, which does not have a complete picture of the learning delays caused by class closures since the start of the pandemic. Without reliable data to implement “effective remedial measures”, the progress of young people with learning difficulties or at risk of dropping out could be compromised and ultimately deprive them of a diploma.
Mme Leclerc tabled Wednesday at the Blue Room the December volume of the report of the Auditor General of Quebec for the year 2022-2023. In this imposing document, we learn that “the analyzes available to the [ministère de l’Éducation] do not allow him to have a complete picture of learning delays in order to put in place the appropriate remedial measures”.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has caused repeated classroom closures and numerous episodes of distance learning, efforts dedicated to helping students, like the $88 million tutoring program, “didn’t not been based on a synthetic analysis of learning delays,” says Mr.me Leclerc.
More concretely, “the budgetary distribution of tutoring measures for learning support did not sufficiently take into account the needs of the pupils”, she says.
IT shortcomings
As in other sectors of society, the Ministry of Education was not ready in March 2020 to deal with a global pandemic that forced schools to close for several weeks. However, what characterizes the Quebec school system, observes Guylaine Leclerc, is the fact that a dozen school service centers still did not have a sufficient quantity of laptops to fully offer online education after 18 months. of pandemic.
” The [ministère de l’Éducation] did not provide sufficient technological support to [centres de services scolaires] and he invested $42 million in videoconferencing devices that remain little used to this day,” says Ms.me Lerclec.
The Auditor General also deplores the fact that the Department of Education was slow to specify the minimum educational services that should be offered to students in the event of class closures. It was not until the start of the 2020-2021 school year that he produced a directive indicating these thresholds.
“In the absence of this directive, the educational services provided to students in the spring of 2020 varied greatly from one [centre de services scolaire] to another,” she said.
Supplements for children with disabilities: a “cumbersome and complex” process
The Auditor General of Quebec, Guylaine Leclerc, deplores that the process for requesting the granting of one of the two existing supplements for handicapped children is “cumbersome and complex”, which does not favor its access for families who need it.
In the year ending 31 December 2021, more than 41,000 children with disabilities received support through a supplement and 4,500 children were additionally entitled to the supplement provided for children with disabilities who require exceptional care.
But, deplores M.me Leclerc, “the processing times for applications are long, and the reassessment process, which aims to verify whether the state of health of children who already receive a supplement has improved and, if necessary, s ‘it still meets the eligibility criteria, was almost discontinued for a decade, from 2011 to 2021’. Consequence: “many children will not have been subject to any reassessment throughout their development, until the age of 18,” says the Auditor General.
Guylaine Leclerc asks the government, among other things, to “simplify access to assistance measures and carry out more follow-up before refusing a request, in particular when the parent has not communicated all the information required”.