You know, that's a great question. It's better to reverse-engineer it and have a look at how we can make a positive change.
When we started to look at this from a multi-agency perspective and looked at the correlation with criminal activity, it became everybody's responsibility. When you start mining into it, you find that in Saskatchewan there are 6,700 kids missing. I don't mean missing as in missing persons, but registered at one school and then not registered somewhere else. How do you increase graduation rates unless you can actually find where they are?
The old, traditional methods obviously, in an enforcement perspective, don't work. But if you think about this in an intervention perspective, if you had a third party actually looking at it as an opportunity to do an intervention that is designed around our hubs and cores; if you started seeing those as opportunities, you could change the way the business is being done.
A lot of this is based in poverty, as you know. If you take a financial income as the starting point to get in, if you need to increase from a 40% attendance rate—let's just use that number, which is actually high—and want to get it to a 90% variance rate, then you can determine what mechanism to use. Is it a social impact bond? Is it pay for success—in other words, impact investing? Perhaps we can use our own money as the investor through incentive-based, or we can bring a third party in.
The point is that this is what we're analyzing now: what is the best way to operationalize this? We know that going from a 40% attendance rate to a 90% attendance rate and maybe throwing a parenting class into the middle of it and attached to it is absolutely a gold mine of return, based on data. But it's a question of putting the right mechanism in to get it right, with what you just described: it needs to be horizontal across sectors.
The problem we have is that every sector is trying to own stuff. That is putting everybody in a silo and then trying to fix something when you know 10% of the story.