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  Once they start school, at age six, the resources available to them don’t differ too widely based on the average income of the area. This is as a result of one of the major policy shifts that happened across Canada during the 1980s; all provinces except Manitoba and Saskatchewan negotiated with local school boards to implement equalised funding. This means that rather than schools being funded by local property taxes like they are in the US (meaning schools in richer areas have more money), most of Canadian schools’ funding comes directly from the province, based on number of students, with additional money for those in poor areas to match their funding to that of schools in richer districts (in the cases where additional funding is still raised by local government), or beat it where there is more need. So even the primary school I visited in a run-down area outside of Toronto seemed pretty well equipped, with interactive whiteboards and a well-stocked library. The provinces also fund some programmes directly, such as special education programmes, early intervention programmes, and a wilderness camp for young offenders.

  I met a mum at a bus stop in this slightly dodgier part of town, pushing a buggy with her two-year-old son. We’d been waiting at the bus stop for 15 minutes already, and then the bus we needed drove by without stopping. There was collective anguish amongst the folk at the bus stop, and it opened up that space that only happens (at least, in England) when public services let you down; it became acceptable to talk to strangers. She picked up on my accent immediately.

  ‘Is that a British accent?’

  ‘Yep. Yeah. It is.’

  ‘What brings you to Ontario? You on holiday?’ She looked a bit unsure as to why I’d be in this part of town if I were.

  ‘I’m doing some research into the world’s best education systems. Do you have kids at school?’

  ‘Yeah, Molly, she’s seven, she’s just started Grade 2.’

  ‘How does she like it so far? Do you think the school system is good here?’

  ‘Yeah, I do actually. Molly was struggling with her reading, she finds it quite tricky, so they said she could go to this summer catch-up class at the school. It seemed to help her out, and it’s cool that they offer that for free.’

  Catching children up on their reading in the first few years of elementary school seems to be a big focus here, as it was in Finland. Teachers spend more time in small reading groups with these children during class, while the others are getting on with independent work (and instructed by one teacher I met not to interrupt her unless it was for one of the ‘3Bs’ – bathroom, bleeding or barfing). This is necessary because children do come into school at different levels, and some pick things up more quickly than others. According to Janet, a Learning Support Teacher, this partly has to do with the month in which they’re born.

  ‘Quite often they’re the late birthdays, November, December, and they’re just not quite developmentally ready to learn to read, and be sitting and working as much as our system expects them to. Most of the kids do OK, they start to pick up the reading, but the ones that I work with are the ones that are struggling with that. So I explicitly show them pieces that the rest of the kids are picking up on their own.’

  Janet works with these children that are falling behind, both in class, and in small groups out of class. In Canada, Learning Support Teachers like Janet are fully-qualified, certified teachers, often with additional qualifications in special educational needs. At a secondary level too, I was shown learning support rooms, manned by a number of qualified teachers, where students could book in or pop by during their free periods to get additional support. Rather than leaving the difficult job of helping those that find learning the hardest to well-meaning but less-qualified teaching assistants, school and district leaders in Canada, like in Finland, recognise that this is a job that requires additional expertise. This is not to devalue the role of teaching assistants in other areas – I have worked with some brilliant ones – but it does seem sensible that those children with the most complex educational needs receive additional input from those with the most specialist training.

  After describing to me how she helped the children catch up, Janet went on to include a strategy that I wasn’t expecting. ‘I also try and explain to them why we’re doing things. I think, if they don’t figure it out on their own, they need somebody to point them in the right direction. Why we’re learning the sounds of the letters. Why we’re learning to recognise the sight words. I think that’s an important part. Most kids just absorb that from the atmosphere in the classroom, but the ones I work with that are struggling maybe just don’t get it at all.’ The motivation of children plays a huge part in whether they succeed, and Janet’s focus on children’s motivations and their experience of school was echoed in many of the conversations I had across the two provinces I visited – British Columbia and Ontario.

  The Canadian Approach to Motivation

  One of the first things an Ontarian primary school principal said to me when I asked her what her responsibilities were, was ‘Making sure there’s an entry point for each child. You know, how can we engage the kids so that they feel valued at the school and like they’re part of a community?’ That sounds lovely, I thought, but how do you actually do it?

  ‘There are many layers. One is obviously the relationships you build in the school. Listening to the children and asking them what kind of things they’d like to be a part of. And, pretty much, we don’t say no to any initiative that the teachers or parents want to bring in, whether it’s that we’ve got a hatchery (chickens) because the kids are interested in that, or they’re going to go and release the salmon because a parent got on that and the kids enjoy it and we want it to be part of their experience. Or they want to do chess club or a craft club – we put money towards that, so that’s what we fundraise for, the money we fundraise all goes to student activities. What are they interested in?’

  I’ve mainly focused on primary school so far, but this concern extended to middle school and high school, and was evident not only in what the teachers and students said, but in the way the system was structured. High schools offer an impressive array of extracurricular activities – tennis, anime, Frisbee, Amnesty International, debating, rugby – you name it and they’ve either got it, or plucky students can set one up. One of the counsellors – professionals who support the personal, social, academic and career development of students through one-to-one and small group sessions – explained to me that one consequence of the array of activities is that ‘Everyone has a stake in school. Like this kid Joey for example,’ she gestured to the notes on her desk, ‘even though he’s finding his courses hard, he doesn’t want to drop out of school because then he’d have to leave the basketball team.’ In British Columbia, some activities like taking part in musicals even count towards your credits for high-school graduation (alongside core academic requirements), and at one high school I visited, the principal proudly told me that 600 out of 1,000 students played on some kind of team.

  You’ll find counsellors in every high school. But they aren’t just there to support students with mental health needs; their role includes chatting to all the students about how everything is going, how they’re finding their studies and about what courses they want to choose. Another counsellor explained to me, ‘All students are worthy of learning, but until they feel loved and cared for, they aren’t going to care about Hamlet.’ In both the counsellors and the teachers that lead the activities, there is an opportunity for the young people to form a meaningful, positive relationship with a responsible adult who cares about their education. This is especially valuable if for any reason they’ve not been able to form such a relationship with their parents or regular teachers.

  This is important because while those who find academic study easy are often already motivated by being good at it, the ones who don’t find it as easy – the ones most likely to fail – need a reason to keep coming to school; a reason to put in the effort. The Canadian strategy seems to be to get them involved by making them
feel part of a school community, using extracurricular activities and stressing the importance of human relationships to do this. Not only is this intrinsically valuable, but there is research to suggest that it has further positive effects too.

  Cornelius-White did a meta-analysis of 119 studies of teachers’ personal attributes (such as empathy and warmth) and their relationship with student outcomes. He found strong correlations between person-centred teacher variables and students’ critical thinking, maths and reading scores, and concluded that teachers facilitate children’s development when they demonstrate that they care for each student as a person.194 Ontario has also recognised the power of relationships in their ‘student success’ strategy, by employing student success teachers whose job is to work directly with students at risk of school dropout.

  Another more structural element that makes a difference to student motivation is the Canadian approach to grouping students. There is no selection into different schools, selection into different tracks within a school (streaming) or selection into different classes for different subjects (setting), until at least Grade 9 (age 14–15), when it commonly begins with the introduction of an advanced math class. This hasn’t always been the case: Canada, like everywhere else, began its education system on the assumption that only a small minority of the population was suited to an academic education, and used to operate ‘bilateral’ schooling – i.e. separate vocational and academic schools. After much discussion and heated debate, this model was gradually replaced across the provinces by a comprehensive school system, with some leading provinces making this transition in 1968, and others following throughout the 1970s, with the final province implementing this system in 1982. Whether or not this change was related to the improvement in Canada’s international test scores that took place throughout the remainder of the 1980s is an open question.

  In Canada, even high schools are comprehensive in intake, but have different levels for different subjects which students can choose to take, supported by chats with the counsellors. So one high-school student I met, for example, let’s call him Mike, was taking foundation math, advanced English and advanced social studies. This is in contrast to most countries where students are tracked into more academic or less academic programmes across all subjects by this age. In fact, student choice is so important in Canada that a school across town from Mike’s only recently brought in cut-off grades required to take ‘advanced math’ in Grade 10 – previously anyone could take it who wanted to, even if they weren’t a mathematical top performer.

  There is also choice in the range and type of subject students can take, so if Mike had wanted, he could have been taking genuinely academic courses alongside vocational courses like metalwork and mechanics, without having to even leave the school building. This is true right across Canada, as found by Learning to School author, Jennifer Walner: ‘Across of all the provinces, secondary education is underpinned by a commitment to extend flexibility to students; it affords them considerable time to determine where their strengths and skills lie before sending them down a particular path.’195

  This delay in pushing students into particular courses has been found to be internationally associated with higher student motivation. The OECD paper that outlines these effects explains that ‘there is a strong negative association between the levels of students’ motivation and the degree to which school systems sort and group students into different schools and/or programmes.’196 In other words, students in systems that separate students into different schools based on their perceived ability are less motivated than students in systems (like Canada’s) that don’t. Singapore’s motivated students seem to be an exception to this trend, perhaps because of their Confucian learning culture.

  The Limits of Individualism

  In this way and others, the Canadian approach to education goes further than any other country I visited to meet children’s individual needs. Partly their hand is forced by the fact that Canada is also a more diverse country than most, with children from different cultural backgrounds and with different first languages all being educated in the same classrooms. Partly it is due to the fact that they can’t rely as much as schools in Asia on parents motivating their children to study, so have more need to find a way to motivate children based on their own interests. Of course, they could still ignore these factors and ignore individual children’s needs, and it is a testament to the teachers of Canada that they don’t. This was impressive. However, based on what I saw, I believe that there is also a limit to the amount of individualisation that is good for children. So here are my caveats.

  I heard a number of teachers in Canada talk about meeting children’s needs by catering to their learning styles. The theory goes that children (and adults) have preferred ways of learning – some prefer visual input, some like to hear about the topic, some would rather learn by doing. Therefore, if teachers match their teaching style to the learning styles of their students, by providing a diagram for one and a hands-on task for another, the children will learn better (this is called the meshing hypothesis). This approach is common in England and I was taught it too when I was doing my teacher training. It was known as VAK, which stands for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic, and I was encouraged to apply it in all my lessons.

  The problem with the theory of learning styles however, is that there is almost no evidence that it works. A review of the evidence by four respected professors of psychology from three different universities found that while children and adults will, if asked, express preferences for the ways they like to learn, there is ‘virtually no evidence’ for the idea that teaching people in their preferred learning style leads to better learning outcomes. ‘Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.’197

  This doesn’t mean teachers shouldn’t use different ways of explaining concepts, but that the appropriate way to explain something has a lot to do with the concept or idea that is being taught, rather than the person learning it. The structural features of mountain ranges in Canada might be best taught visually for example, whereas getting the students to consider what it’s like to be new to a country might be better taught by conducting some of the lesson in an unfamiliar language. Sometimes for particularly tricky topics, the children may benefit from having them explained in more than one way, and I’m sure this is the approach that many Canadian teachers take too.

  The issue I would like to draw attention to though goes deeper than whether something is a waste of teachers’ time or not. Sometimes, a well-meaning attempt to adapt the educational environment to the student can lead to low expectations of that child in the short term, which puts them at a disadvantage in the long term. Though this problem isn’t limited to learning styles, it serves as a clear example of how it works.

  Let’s say Joe in Year 5 doesn’t like reading, and prefers to build things and paint things. It might be said that he has a ‘kinaesthetic’ learning style, and so his teacher might ask him to paint a picture of the Roman baths based on the other pictures in a history book, rather than reading up about them like his desk-mate Sarah is doing. In the next class, he sorts and matches some cards with the names of poets and their most famous poems on them, while she reads some of those poems. Quite apart from the question of who will learn the most about Roman baths or poetry, he is not getting any better at reading, and she is not getting any better at painting. Their differences – their strengths and their weaknesses – are being exaggerated and encouraged, and all Joe’s future literary possibilities and Sarah’s artistic possibilities are being closed down at an early age, rather than being worked on and expanded.

  Let me give you a real-life example from my trip of where individualism went too far. I visited one school in Vancouver, where I met a really
passionate, enthusiastic Grade 12 history teacher who invited me to come into her school and talk to her students. She’d recently set the group a task to watch a video for homework, so that students could get straight to making use of that information in the lesson. Here is a conversation she had with one of her students who hadn’t watched the video that he was supposed to watch, about how he found that type of homework.

  ‘Did it work for you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m lazy.’

  ‘So you were lazy and you didn’t get it done. But my hope is that next time we do it, you and I can have a one-on-one lesson, while the other 29 students who have watched it get on with the essay reflection or whatever the task is. So what you thought was a failure, like “it didn’t work for me” is in fact like a huge educational victory. I’m like, well I’m glad it didn’t work for you, because now I can work with you, does that make sense?’

  This teacher is being lovely; supporting the student to learn and involving him in the lesson even though he admits it was his own laziness that means he’s not prepared. Perhaps that young man had been having a tough time at home, and so she was making exceptions for him in order to include him in a class that he might otherwise drop out of. There might be really good reasons for this approach. But on the surface, it looks like the teacher is accepting that ‘laziness’ is an inherent feature of this student, that he won’t do his homework next time either, and that therefore she should adapt the educational environment to suit the student by teaching him in class what he should have done for homework. If this is the case, then this student is never going to work hard because he knows he doesn’t have to. That might be great for him at school – he’s getting the teacher’s undivided attention after all – but he won’t last long in any job if he tells his boss that he didn’t do the paperwork because he’s lazy. Sometimes, rather than adapting the environment to the child, the adult needs to support the child in learning to adapt themselves to the environment.