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Hello, Mr. Chair, dear MPs, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique, the CSF.
You committee knows full well how important it is to recruit children right from infancy in order to enhance the vitality of our minority community. Your committee has also discussed and studied the importance of early childhood to our community on numerous occasions. Through the work you did in 2012 and 2016, and also through the work of the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages in 2005 and 2017, you have been able to identify the structural problems that require permanent solutions. We appreciate the work you have done.
These problems will not be resolved by another action plan or protocol alone. Funding is absolutely necessary, but it is not enough to protect our community's rights. That is why we humbly propose a permanent solution to the major problems you have identified, in the form of amendments to the Official Languages Act.
In our presentation, Marc-André and I will talk about the CSF's experience with our early childhood education program, for four-year-olds. This experience confirms what the literature in the social sciences tells us. Early childhood education directly affects children's development, and in particular the development of children from minority communities. That is also discussed in our brief. Finally, we will talk about the multilateral early learning and child care framework and the solutions we propose to tackle the challenges related to education and early childhood.
To begin, I will describe our pilot project for four-year-olds, which is federally funded.
Launched in 2013, the project is designed to better prepare students for kindergarten, both linguistically and culturally. As part of this project, we developed a new program to offer new classes for four-year-olds.
To help you understand the impact and scope of this project, let me first provide some background information.
Since it was founded, the CSF has experienced strong and steady growth, with the number of students rising from 1,750 initially to over 6,000 students today, while the majority of the province's other school boards have seen a drop in enrolment.
The profile of British Columbia's francophone community is much more complex, however, than its school enrolment might suggest. The rate of linguistic and cultural exogamy is very high, and the province has one of the highest rates of assimilation in the country.
In response these challenges and with hard work, the CSF began offering classes for four-year-olds in the cities of Kelowna, Mission, Chilliwack, and Rossland. Table 2 on page 7 of our brief shows the number of children enrolled in these programs in the two years they have been offered. All but one of the students in the pilot project enrolled in kindergarten the next year. That is a quite a triumph for the CSF. The results of the program for four-year-olds are in table 3 on page 9 of the brief. Their results are better than those of children who did not begin school until kindergarten, at roughly 5 years of age. The results are impressive, but far from surprising in light of the scientific and academic research on the subject.
You can appreciate why the CSF would like to extend the pilot project to more schools. To do that, additional funding will of course be needed. The province does not fund initiatives for children under the age of 5.
The success of the pilot project is not an accident. The social sciences research clearly demonstrates that early childhood education is fundamental for a child's development, even more so for children from minority communities.