Right. As I said in my opening statement, one of the things that concerned me early on is that our government more than tripled funding for settlement services, including language instruction for newcomers to Canada, with a very small increase in enrolment amongst those eligible for free classes: all permanent residents in Canada.
Now, obviously some of those permanent residents—the 20% who have been assessed for their human capital, foreign skilled workers, provincial nominees to some extent—are less likely to need language instruction. Presumably they already have some proficiency in English or French, and secondly, they're working, so it's more difficult for them to find the time.
Often women tend to be our primary clientele. I think around two-thirds of the enrollees in our language instruction classes tend to be women. That is a good thing, I believe. Many often come with lower language proficiency levels than primary economic immigrants, who tends disproportionately to be male. But still, not enough were enrolling. That's why one of the things we did when we expanded the funding was to provide for greater child care availability through the service-providing organizations and also to increase the quality of instruction.
Now we're looking at innovative ways to increase the enrolment. About 18 months ago we took 2,000 eligible permanent residents and we sent them vouchers. We said they were worth so many hours of language instruction. It was a way of getting a tangible value in front of them. Rather than expecting them to hear about the free classes from word of mouth, the vouchers would arrive in their hands and they could think about how it might be worthwhile to enrol. We found that 7% of those who received vouchers used them to enrol in a class within six months, whereas only 3% of the control group, who did not receive the vouchers, enrolled in the same period of time.
That would suggest there was a much higher rate of enrollment. There will be a final study done on the voucher pilot program next spring. If it's successful, I will certainly ask the department to explore options for rolling this out on a broader basis.