Classroom crisis: Ontario student, teacher disparity to ‘widen’ more, internal document warns

Unions are warning the province that a teaching crisis has already hit Ontario as internal government documents show the new education minister was warned to expect the gap between the number of teachers and students to “widen” beginning in 2027.

Briefing documents written for Todd Smith when he became Ontario’s education minister for a matter of weeks over the summer, and obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws, paint a worrying picture of school staffing across the province.

“Many Ontario school boards have identified challenges with the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers,” one sentence says as part of a broader explanation of the province’s growing staffing problems.

“Modelling projects that student enrolment over the coming years is expected to increase along with teacher retirements, while the supply of new teachers is to remain stable, absent intervention,” Smith, who resigned in August to be replaced by Jill Dunlop, was told.

“These factors are projected to result in a growing gap between the number of teachers needed and the number of teachers available. This project gap is expected to widen beginning in 2027.”

That sentence, Ontario NDP education critic Chasma Parma said, fails to lay out the gravity of the situation in classrooms.

“This is an area where I wish I could write the minister’s briefing binder because they’ve significantly underplayed the problem here — the teaching shortage is already a massive problem,” she told Global News.

“This is an ongoing problem already — now, that we have to address now. It’s not going to be a problem three years from now.”

A spokesperson for the Minister of Education told Global News teachers in Ontario are among the highest-paid in the country, pointing to government funding for educational staff and assistants as evidence of provincial investment.

The issue, the government contends, is a national problem and not unique to Ontario or its policies.

“We’ve introduced a number of measures to tackle the national challenge of teacher shortages, including halving processing timelines for domestic and international applicants, permanently allowing second-year teaching candidates to work in schools sooner, and replacing seniority-based hiring with a merit-based system for quicker recruitment of staff,” the spokesperson said.

“School boards and education unions need to do their part by creating a serious plan to improve teacher absenteeism with better attendance management practices that ensure students are continually taught by qualified educators in the classrooms now and into the future.”

Teaching unions, however, say there’s a gap in teaching resources in classrooms right now and claim it stems from how the government treats the profession, more than a problem with training and supplying new staff.

Both the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario have been sounding the alarm on working conditions for teachers which, the two unions say, are squeezing new graduates out of the profession before they ever get their feet under the desk.

“We don’t have enough teachers right now, and it’s not because we don’t have enough people qualified in the province — there’s about 40,000 people with qualifications for the College of Teachers who are not working in public education, they’re doing other jobs they’ve left — it’s a question of working conditions, violence, all of those things,” Karen Littlewood, OSSTF president, told Global News.

Karen Brown, president of the ETFO, has been particularly vocal on the issue of violence in schools.

She said a lack of support in the classroom, particularly for children with additional learning needs, is leading to growing violence impacting teachers and classes that new staff struggle to manage.

The in-classroom issues, both unions believe, are putting many potential new teachers off the role, creating a situation where new teachers continue to qualify at a decent rate but fail to ever take their education into the classroom.

“This is not an issue of a teacher shortage, it’s really around the crisis of good working conditions,” Brown told Global News. “There are enough qualified teachers, however, they don’t want to be in the classroom and that’s what we need to look at.”

Current shortages and retention issues are something the government also acknowledges internally.

The documents created to brief Smith when he became education minister refer to the problem schools have hiring staff to cover for teachers who are on leave, in particular.

“Some school boards are facing particular challenges in recruiting and retaining occasional teachers for short-term teacher coverage,” the documents explain.

“This is due to higher-than-average rates of absences among teachers, in addition to teacher coverage required for teachers on professional development training and those supporting extracurricular activities.”

Ministry officials say that some of those issues relate to absenteeism around the weekend, though the unions say the problem is much broader.

Part of the issue, Littlewood contends, is a feeling that those at the very top of the Ford government don’t value the role of teachers.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently made comments about a field trip controversy in Toronto, telling teachers to “stick to their knitting” and adding that he had “said this is indoctrination for years,” referring to a small number of “bad actors” in the teaching profession.

Littlewood said those comments, combined with limited mentions of teaching in key documents like the province’s annual budget, left those entering the profession with the perception they were unimportant to the government.

“When you have a premier who tells teachers to stick to their knitting, there’s very little respect for education that’s being demonstrated by the government,” she said.

“When you have a government that’s deliberately short-changing, underfunding education and then saying — or not saying — those types of things, it becomes really hard.”

Brown said that, if the government’s internal analysis thinks the current student-teacher gap is going to widen in three years, the system will be in for a shock. She suggested that without intervention, schools would be forced to hire more temporary, unqualified teachers, a move that she said would hurt students.

“That would be an absolute failure on the government, it would be really for them dropping the ball, neglecting that,” she said.

“I think if this trend continues, that number of those departing will absolutely increase, it won’t be 40,000 that are qualified and not teaching, it could be up as high as maybe 50,000 or more who have their certification but are looking at other things.”