Thank you very much.
Thank you for the opportunity to present today. We're pleased that the government has committed to developing a national poverty reduction plan and, while our focus today will be on education, I do believe there needs to be a broad, more societal, multi-faceted approach. I'm here representing close to half a million teachers in Canada, but I'm a teacher. I have seen poverty first-hand. I was in a school until 2015, and I have over 34 years of teaching experience within the public system in New Brunswick. I've bought food; I've bought school supplies; and I've clothed kids, so when I'm making my points today, I have faces in my head. Teachers see children living in poverty on a daily basis.
Certainly addressing poverty means addressing family poverty. These children are not there on their own for the most part; they have families that are struggling as well. As teachers, we do that as well. We reach out to families and try to provide some of that support.
We congratulate the government on taking a step in that direction with the Canada child benefit, but we really need to look more broadly than at just youth and schools. We need to talk about affordable housing, rental housing, addressing precarious work and underemployment, and we've heard about it right here. We do need to invest in our families, because those are the children who are our future.
Schools can be a hub for the provision of these services. In the education sector we're hearing about cuts and school closures. There is space in schools for the school to be a community hub for the provision of these services. I'm familiar with a school in New Brunswick that actually has done that. When their health centre was going to close, the community lobbied to have those services there. Not only are the services provided in the school, parents don't need to drive, and they don't need to worry about transportation costs. They don't need to worry about taking time off work to get these services for their children, because they're right in the school building. Students are not losing much learning time. The school and the community health centre work together, and the professionals within the centre work together.
We need to have a plan to address issues involving students that addresses hunger and youth and child mental health. Schools can be an entry point. I think schools are already an informal entry point for this, but the services just aren't there for us to provide to students. Education is the key to lifting children out of poverty. Children need access to education that's free from impacts of privatization and other forms of social streaming.
Really, K-12 schools are preparing children for a workplace that may not even exist yet, for jobs that are not even developed yet. We have no idea what they'll need to do. They need a broad base of skills like critical thinking and problem solving, which we call soft skills. They are not the hard academics of reading and math that seem to be where we have put the focus. International standardized testing has done some of that, but schools are much broader. We need to have social programming, and there are all kinds of opportunities that we're missing.
Speaking of access to higher education, we had a pilot project here in Canada called Future To Discover. We had students in New Brunswick and Manitoba who were offered voluntary after-school career counselling. They were also offered funding if they enrolled in post-secondary. They needed to be in their second year to access that funding, but these students were offered the funding when they were in Grade 10.
The initial cost-benefit analysis showed low administrative costs. For every dollar spent, the return was between $2.40 and $3.00. That project is there, and it's a longitudinal study, so they're still following these students as they go further in their life, and we have some of that pilot project work here Canada.
They also found, for students who were involved in this project in high school, that it affected their choices of courses, and it also affected their engagement in school. They were more apt to graduate, so it not only affected their post-high school years; it affected their high school years as well.
Public education is a societal good. We call it the great equalizer. To some extent that's true, but I think it could be more so.
Students transition from K-to-12 schools into the workplace, but really school is not the place to provide that training. Employers need to provide that on-the-job training. Schools need to provide the broad base so students can continue that learning once they enter the workforce.
We talked about facility in another language. We believe all students in Canada should have the opportunity to learn a second language. We are a bilingual country. All students need to have that opportunity, and not just in specialized programs.
There are apprenticeship possibilities that happen within schools. At present there are co-op programs and there are apprenticeship programs in education sectors across the country. There is a bit of a challenge to this, though, because it's up to the apprentices to find the experienced masters who are willing to take on the apprenticeships. We have teachers who are beating the bushes to make sure they have enough placements for students within the areas in which they have an interest, but they may be reluctant to take on an apprentice. I think the governments could focus more on how they could provide incentives to do that.
That brings me to financial literacy. It seems that everything people think kids need to know, schools need to do. We've been using financial literacy for years. I taught elementary school. I used money to teach. We counted nickels and dimes, and that's how we counted. We counted by fives and tens, because it's tangible. We've done a lot of that in high schools. That extends even further.
In conclusion, Canadian teachers see the effects of poverty on a daily basis in the children and the youth that are right in front of us. As I said, I have faces in my head as I say this. Actually, we owe it to these students, we owe it to their families, and we actually owe it to our country to address this need.
Thank you.