The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the inability of the Ministry of Education to properly manage distance learning, thus penalizing children, deprived of the educational services to which they were entitled.
This is revealed in the Auditor General’s 2022-2023 annual report, released on Wednesday, which emphasizes the department’s too slow reaction time, a shortcoming for which the students have paid the price.
When schools were forced to close in March 2020 due to the pandemic, the Ministry of Education took nearly two months to implement distance education. It was not until the next school year, in the fall of 2020, that the ministry issued a directive on distance education, setting the minimum thresholds of educational services to be offered to students.
For the children, this way of proceeding will have caused learning delays, which, three years later, may not have been made up for.
It is difficult to have the right time, because the ministry has not taken the trouble to draw a global portrait of the learning delays due to the pandemic, which would have nevertheless enabled it to put in place the remedial measures. appropriate, notes Guylaine Leclerc.
“These delays, if they are not made up for by effective remedial measures, risk compromising the educational progress of these young people and depriving them of a diploma,” she writes.
Quebec has invested $87 million in remedial measures, offering tutoring to students, “but without knowing if it was really going to the children who really needed it,” lamented the auditor at a press conference.
School service tools and centers
During the pandemic, the technical support provided by Quebec to school service centers (CSS) was variable across the territory. After 18 months of the pandemic, 57 of the 72 school service centers (CSS) had still not received the computers needed for online teaching at the start of the 2020-2021 school year. A year later, a dozen of them still had to do without it.
The ministry failed to provide the technological tools students needed, the report reads. Also for distance education, Quebec has also invested $42 million to acquire videoconferencing equipment. The problem: delivery and installation. In July 2022, one in two devices had still not been installed.
The Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, rejected the blame on the school service centers (CSS), a structure created by the CAQ government to replace school boards.
In a press scrum, he said data on educational delays related to the pandemic and distance learning had not been made available by CSS. “We are still measuring this delay. The work is not finished,” said the minister.
“I’m asking my school service centers for the data that will allow me to have a complete picture of the situation, including in terms of lateness. There are data that I don’t have, that I need” to draw this global portrait and create a “dashboard” in education.
“Truly sorry” report
For her part, the official opposition’s education critic, Liberal MP Marwah Rizqy, called the report “truly distressing”.
According to her, he demonstrates the “disconcerting jovialism” displayed by the government during the pandemic. She wonders: “how many children have we escaped because of the pandemic”?
Marwah Rizqy recalls that the Legault government claims that education is its priority. “This is false,” replies the MP, convinced that the Ministry of Education should, when adopting measures, “target disadvantaged communities” to reduce the risk of dropping out of school.
In union circles, the reaction was just as strong.
“There are no surprises in this report! On the contrary, the Auditor General confirms all the inconsistencies that we have repeatedly pointed out to the department during the pandemic. How many times have we asked him to provide a clear and uniform plan to all the establishments in the network to avoid inequalities? Or to consult us before decisions are made in order to have a fair idea of what is happening on the ground. It was a question of common sense, but the leaders preferred to turn a deaf ear and continue to navigate on sight, ”commented Éric Gingras, the president of the Centrale des unions du Québec (CSQ).