Attendance and participation are key parts of what we're hearing at regional education agreement tables. As I said earlier, those are the venues where partners can look at the needs and outcomes defined by their vision for education within their communities—one community or multiple communities. The basic tenets that come up are these: Are students participating in class? Are they progressing and are they completing? Beyond that, we work to have our partners tell us what that means to them. We've heard examples such as a longer or shorter secondary...to accommodate family or working needs, potentially, or different times for a year-long secondary education grade.
All those things are possible through the development of a regional education agreement. The departmental indicators are anchored in that graduation rate, but the regional education agreements let us go a bit further. The engagement happening on the departmental educators is similar, but we try to make them as minimal as possible in recognition of first nations control and to eliminate the reporting burden in terms of information and data that aren't being used to generate that funding. Striking the right balance is exactly what we're discussing, not only through co-development with our partners in the AFN, but also with individual regional education agreement tables—anywhere it comes up.
We're learning from our self-governing partners, as well. There were examples with the MK agreement and some of the B.C. agreements. With jurisdictional control come all the reporting and data by and for the communities, to their membership. We learn from our self-governing partners, as well, in order to guide us on the right balance between departmental reporting reach and what is rightly under first nations control.