Let me just reflect, first of all, on the long-term and predictable.... As those of you who have run organizations will know, when you have short-term funding—a year or two years—it's very hard to do a whole bunch of things, including plan for the future, but also to recruit and retain really qualified educators.
With 10-year agreements, you can actually stabilize the education system that you're running, including ensuring the stability of educators. Some of you—Madame Gill, for example, and others—have been teachers and know that the relationship between students and teachers is an important part of outcomes. When people don't have the confidence or the control.... We see this frequently, especially in remote communities. Teachers go in for a couple of years and then fly out for greener pastures in teaching that maybe will be closer to their own families or their own cultures.
In terms of culture and language—and, again, this is coming from the chiefs, from the students and from the families I've had an opportunity to speak with—everybody, without a doubt, says that when students feel safe, respected, and understood and are learning a curriculum that is relevant to their lives and to their own world view, having an opportunity to learn it in languages that oftentimes they've heard at home—whether it's through grandparents or other relatives—provides a better sense of grounding for that student. The student is then more connected to the school.
When we talk about the failure of education systems to graduate first nations students from mainstream secondary schools, oftentimes it's because those students have left school. It's not because they've reached grade 12 and failed. It's because they've often left class, left schools, because they don't feel welcome in those systems, or they've experienced disproportionate racism, either at the hands of the educators—which is extremely sad—or from their peers.
Quite frankly, the curriculum is in some cases offensive, because it whitewashes their experiences as indigenous people. This turns the page.
I have a real, high degree of hope that we'll see more and more of these agreements come online in the next number of years.