Thank you very much.
My name is Glyn Lewis, and I am the Executive Director of Canadian Parents for French — British Columbia and Yukon. I think this is the second time I've appeared before your committee.
I will speak to you in English, but I invite you to ask your questions in French. It will give me a chance to practise speaking French a bit.
I don't want to reiterate too much of what I said last time—I think it was about a year ago that we met—but I will summarize some of the key points and then obviously put them within the context of the announcement of the official languages action plan.
First of all, I want to start by thanking the Government of Canada for its commitments in the action plan. I think there were some bold and important funding commitments and some new priorities and initiatives in the action plan that are going to help us. I think it was very much reflective of some of the things that we had been mentioning to this committee and to the government before, in terms of priorities that we saw in the community. I just wanted to start by thanking the government for listening and for recognizing some of the things that we have identified over the years.
The context, from our organizational perspective, is that we promote French as a second language, which makes us different from some of the other organizations that you've heard here today. We promote programs such as French immersion and core French. These are not constitutionally protected programs. The programs are considered to be “by choice”, and I put “by choice” in quotation marks. The good news is that in British Columbia and in Yukon, we have seen phenomenal growth in French as a second language programs for almost 20 years now. I think that's a wonderful testament to bilingualism in Canada and the promotion of our two official languages.
Specifically, for French immersion, we've seen 20 years of growth. There are now over 53,000 students in this province in French immersion programs, which is just about 9.5% of the entire student body. That's an incredible development, and we're actually celebrating 50 years of French immersion this coming year here in British Columbia.
On the core French side, there are about 170,000 students learning French, typically between grades 6 and 8. Now, the challenge that I identified last time I met with the committee is that because of all of this phenomenal demand and all of this growth in French as a second language programs here in B.C., one of the things we've seen is a very serious shortage of French teachers.
Our organization estimates that we are short today roughly 100 to 150 French teachers in the province of British Columbia, and we believe that this has a detrimental impact on two fronts. One is in terms of accessibility of the program. Here in Vancouver, a year and a half ago the Vancouver School Board cut one-quarter of their entire French immersion program, which was oversubscribed, because they said that they couldn't find enough French teachers. That means hundreds and eventually thousands of little kids here in Vancouver are going to be turned away from learning French through the French immersion program because they said they couldn't find enough French teachers. We don't think that's acceptable.
The other way that this has an impact is on the quality of instruction. As soon as school districts can't find enough French teachers, in some situations they start putting teachers into classrooms who might not feel comfortable teaching the subject. We believe that potentially has a detrimental impact on the quality of instruction and the quality of learning.
That was one major thing that we mentioned to this committee last year. I was very pleased to see that the action plan has $31 million set aside for French teacher recruitment and retention strategies over the course of the action plan. We think that's going to help not just in B.C. but all across Canada, because this French teacher shortage is a pan-Canadian problem now.
We've identified a number of different strategies that include recruitment, including recruitment in other provinces to recruit teachers here to B.C. but also out-of-country recruitment. We think recruitment is one important pillar to address this French teacher shortage.
The second one is to train more teachers here in our post-secondary institutions, and the third pillar to address this French teacher shortage is retention, doing better to support teachers and to help them stay in the classrooms. I have a brief on this that has much more detail and I will submit to the clerk so that the committee members can have it and can read over some of the recommendations. I think this is important, because within the context of the $31 million that has been set aside for French teacher recruitment and retention, the question now is what we prioritize, and I think that's going to be a very important conversation going forward.
That's my five minutes, and I'll just leave it there.
Thank you.