Thank you very much, monsieur le président et membres du comité, for accepting our joint English minority language community's request to appear before you this morning to discuss the federal government's current and future strategy towards official languages.
We must emphasize the importance of consultation with the English minority community in Quebec on a regular basis. Consequently, the Quebec English School Boards Association welcomes this opportunity to engage with you in an important discussion regarding the contributions, concerns, and expectations that characterize Canada's other official language minority community, English-speaking Quebeckers. We're pleased to be presenting with our community partners, the Quebec Community Groups Network and the Community Economic Development and Employability Corporation.
Naturally, our focus will be on public education. The Quebec English School Boards Association represents the nine English language school boards across the province of Quebec and one special status school board. Our network comprises 340 schools and approximately 95,000 students. Those numbers, however, are deceiving. Don't let them fool you, since we must remind you that the English-speaking population in Quebec is a minority. In fact, we find ourselves in the particular situation of being a minority within a minority, and that sometimes leaves us ignored on these very important consultations.
Our community registered roughly 171,000 students in 1972. Today our records from June 2016 indicate approximately 98,000 students, including adult and vocational programs. That's almost a 50% decline in a span of 40 years, and we continue to trend down.
We attribute this loss to Bill 101 for the most part, but we are also competing with private schools and the false perception that young Quebeckers will not learn French in our school system. In fact, we boast an 85% success rate across the province, and our students are not only completing their French mother tongue exams very well, but they're doing so with higher marks than students enrolled in the francophone public education system.
We all know that education is a cornerstone of any society as the key element for the vitality and the longevity of minority language communities, and it is clear our community is struggling to maintain our institutions and even our critical mass. As you plan your strategy, we would like for you to consider four key contributions of the Quebec English school boards.
With the vital help of the Canada-Quebec entente on minority and second-language education, our students are graduating from English public schools with the capacity to live and work in French as well as English. Our school system is a world pioneer in French language education, and it became so with the financial support of this vital agreement.
Second, our community learning centres, otherwise known as CLCs, within our language schools are crucial in supporting the stability, creativity, and co-operation of urban, rural, and suburban communities across English-speaking Quebec. In some rural communities, federal support for CLCs has made the difference between closing down a school, thereby compromising the future of that particular community, and instead building new partnerships towards an invigorated population, so we thank you for that.
Third, our English public school network, thanks to distances, low population densities, and limited resources, have become an example of innovation and invention. With 21st century learning techniques, support of distance education, e-learning, shared programs and services, exchanges with our French school boards, and partnerships with the business community and others, English public schools are adapting to the changing needs of the challenges that they face.
Our boards have developed passionate and forward-thinking programs for the inclusion of students with special needs, and our high school rates, as I mentioned earlier, currently at 85%, continue to improve, and we're very proud of that. I would be remiss if I didn't underline that these two trademarks of the English public school system would not be possible if we did not have the funding and oversight of the Government of Canada.
Our fourth point is that English public schools are contributing to, not working against, the common future for all Quebeckers in our home province.
While there remains a tendency within Canada's majority language communities, often exploited by the media and at times aggravated by certain political figures and parties, to frame every question as a language tug-of-war, with a winner and a loser, our English schools and the communities we serve are increasingly involved in and contributing to the economic and cultural life of Quebec. Furthermore, they are contributing to the strength and the security of the French language in Quebec.
What are our concerns? Support for and interest in the vitality and the development of minority language communities has not always topped the list of priorities identified by Canadians or embraced by governments. English-speaking Quebec, in all of its diversity, is among Canada's most bilingual communities, and becoming more so every day, as we have heard recently. That is an asset for this country, but assets, as we all know, must be nurtured.
Any weakening of the level of federal support in future Canada-Quebec education accords, any lessening of the community's strong consultative role in decisions on the allocation of funds under those accords, or any structural shift that would weaken or remove federal oversight over transferred funds for minority language education in Quebec would be a real and present concern to us.
Canada's English-speaking minority community has benefited from a profound presence and a critical population mass around the city of Montreal. No doubt a dispersed francophone community across Canada has not had that luxury, and we recognize that. Nonetheless, our diverse needs are here, and they must be addressed equitably.
Based on the measure of the first official language spoken, our total population is roughly the equivalent of that of francophone Canada outside of Quebec. The needs are there, when particularly in more rural locations there are six-year-olds on buses for as long as three hours a day and students awaiting appointments with school psychologists and speech therapists for years, not months. There are still challenges in reviewing our communities and encouraging newcomers to join us.
We are looking for equitable support from our federal government as the Quebec English School Boards Association joins other community partners in addressing these challenges.
I look forward to an exchange with you.
Thank you very much for listening.