A report from New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate is calling for urgent action to address a decade-long slide in child literacy rates in the province.
In 2021-22, about 40 per cent of fourth-grade children didn’t meet literacy standards. In 2010, the province’s high-water mark for childhood literacy, 85 per cent of second-graders in the anglophone system and 77 per cent in the francophone system were meeting standards.
That was after a decade-long push to raise early literacy outcomes. In 2003-04, 59.4 per cent of anglophone second-graders weren’t meeting standards. That’s almost identical to last year’s rate of 59.5.
Advocate and former provincial education minister Kelly Lamrock says that needs to be urgently addressed, just as it was in the early part of this century.
“It was kind of heartbreaking to see that we are kind of where we were back in 2003,” Lamrock said. “I think we sometimes deal with it as, ‘Oh, nothing ever changes,’ but it did — mostly because of teachers and principals…. It wasn’t any one government or any one minister.
“We can do better and the fact we slid back to where we were, at least we can get better.”
The improvement of the late aughts was based on a system-wide focus on early literacy, Lamrock says, along with measures to address classroom composition and support teachers who were bringing innovative solutions to the table. Those tools are still available, he says.
“There were professional learning communities and a focus on professional development. Teachers knew early literacy was the focus, they knew it was being measured and everything went back to it,” he said.
Resources ‘strained really thin’
Education Minister Bill Hogan saw the improvements that led to 2010’s rates first-hand during his time as an educator. He says the department is working on a “building blocks” program, similar to “literacy mentors,” that would take small groups of students and help them catch up.
Other unspecified measures to improve literacy are being discussed, Hogan says, but are unlikely to come with additional funding.
“I think we have the resources that we need in the system to improve our literacy rates, it’s just a question of where we’re going to focus on and the more we focus on early learning the better off we’re going to be in the later years,” he said.
That’s out of step with the reality in classrooms, according to Liberal Leader Susan Holt, who says the system is suffering from a lack of teachers and specialized staff like psychologists.
“I don’t think that we can rearrange the current resources, because they are strained really thin and struggling to deliver the literacy results that we want as well as the mental health results that we all want for our kids,” she said.
Just focusing on the education system itself isn’t enough for Green Party Leader David Coon. He says that if broader social issues like poverty aren’t addressed, outcomes aren’t likely to improve. That means instituting a living wage or universal basic income, along with greater supports for new parents.
“Until there’s a strong focus on addressing those social determinants of the well-being of children, it’s not going to get better,” he said.
Lamrock’s report also raised concerns over youth mental health outcomes, noting that self-reported rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing. He repeated a call made in previous reports, for the province to determine what a true primary mental health-care system looks like and then implement it.
The report also identifies dwindling civics education as a growing concern and calls for students to be taught about the importance of democratic institutions and how they relate to diversity from early grades.
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