Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The questions are for the Minister responsible for ECE. Mr. Speaker, with all the recent attention of potential changes to the NWT school curriculum in the media and news articles suggesting the NWT is dropping the Alberta curriculum, can the Minister please clarify if a decision has been made to move away from Alberta? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Hay River South. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I thank the Member for asking me this and giving me a chance to clarify. There has been a lot of chatter about this lately. For those of you who pay attention to what is said in this House, it's been almost one year to the day that I've been talking about renewing the curriculum in the Northwest Territories. This discussion has been ongoing.
After our report from the Office of the Auditor General of Canada saying that we need to do something with our education system, we started looking at every single aspect of what we do, and renewing our curriculum was one of those things that we wanted to look at. However, we have not made a decision. We are nowhere near making a decision. We are in the very early stages of seeing what is out there. Alberta is renewing its curriculum now. B.C. has a modern curriculum. The Yukon uses that curriculum. There are other curriculum developments across Canada, and it's incumbent upon us to ensure that whatever curriculum we use is right for the people of the Northwest Territories. As I said, Alberta is renewing their curriculum, so one way or another, we're getting a new curriculum. We need to do our due diligence, but we are a ways away from making any sort of decision. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I hope that comment about paying attention wasn't directed at me.
---Laughter
Mr. Speaker, I'll ask the Minister: why is ECE changing the NWT curriculum, and how are those changes made? Will there be opportunity for input from the public or the partners?
As I stated, we are always looking at our curriculum, always looking at what is new. There're people in the department who, this is their job. They focus on curriculum. As I said, given the Office of the Auditor General results as well as our own results as well as the fact that we know we need to do better, we wanted to look and see if, perhaps, adjusting our curriculum is a way to do that. There're a lot of options. Looking forward, we could stay with Alberta's new curriculum. We could create a partnership with another jurisdiction. We could, perhaps, use K to eight of one jurisdiction and then use nine to twelve with Alberta. There're a lot of opportunities here. We just want to make sure that we are doing what's right for the students of the Northwest Territories. Ideally, we would be able to develop our own curriculum, but the fact is, it's too costly. It would be well beyond the reach of this territory. In other jurisdictions, their curriculum development shops are huge, and we just don't have that.
My third question, I guess he answered part of it: why can't the NWT just develop our own curriculum, but it sounds like it's too expensive. Why do we have to partner with another province besides the fact that we're talking about money?
We have to partner with another jurisdiction just for that fact that it is too expensive. That is not to say that we do not have a lot of our own curriculum. We have a junior kindergarten curriculum that is really world class, and other jurisdictions in Canada have approached us about it. We have specific courses developed in the Northwest Territories, things like Northern Studies 10. We are working on Northern Studies 20. We have science courses developed in the territory, the Our Languages curriculum. We do do a lot. However, to develop an entire curriculum, the assessments that go along with the curriculum, for example, the diploma examinations that we have now, it's just well beyond our reach, and financially, it's just not doable.
Final supplementary. Member for Hay River South.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will ask the Minister: when will a final decision be made, and then, when can we expect the new curriculum to roll out to schools? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We cannot do this alone. We are so early on in this, we have not reached out to the education bodies yet, to the Indigenous bodies, anything like that, so we are starting that process now. We have done a lot of the leg work, but there is still much more to do. The decision would come in the summer at the earliest, and if we were to adopt a new curriculum, it would not be rolling out until 2022. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Frame Lake.
