Public Mandates + Agencies

A cursory environmental scan will reveal that work on bridging COVID-related gaps in education is already underway in Ontario, as well as other provinces and organizations. For example, a Global News feature in September 2021 reported that the Pembina Trails School Division in Manitoba has hired literacy instructional coaches, separate from classroom subject teachers, to focus on helping students achieve grade-level skills. Ontario’s own Growing Success policies include, generally, and, as communicated in August 2020 in specific relation to the pandemic, the expectation that schools/teachers “provide differentiated support to all students, including English and French language-learners and students with disabilities or who have an individual education plan.” Further to this, in February 2022, the Ontario government announced the introduction of a provincial tutoring program “for the 2022-23 school year. . .[which] will support learning recovery and mental health supports for students to enable them to return to a more normal school year next year.”

By these edicts, schools are both directly and indirectly bound to demonstrate an effort to narrow, and even close, gaps in student learning sustained as a result of conditions brought about by the pandemic, but classroom teachers alone cannot achieve pandemic educational recovery for their students. While governments and school boards have begun to make efforts to achieve educational recovery, for a myriad of reasons, ranging from general resources, finances, policy, and lack of necessary infrastructure, it can be reasonably argued that these efforts are beginning too late and are, for now, at best, an unevenly distributed patchwork of incomplete solutions to the problem.