Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
My first question is does the Minister have any idea what currently is the rate of functional literacy amongst adults in the NWT?
Thank you, Member for Yellowknife North. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Member for raising this. And, unfortunately, ECE does not have this type of data. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So does the government have any plans to conduct a new survey amongst adults to find out what literacy levels actually are? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in 2012 was the first program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies Literacy Survey. And the second such survey, in order to provide kind of the second baseline of what that would look like, was launched in 2022. Unfortunately, at that time it was identified that it would cost around $5 million for the territories across Canada to participate in that survey. So the three territories did not participate in the survey. And currently CMEC, along with Statistics Canada and the organization for economic cooperation and development and the three territories, are looking at other options to obtain this data, including the use of potentially an online version of this testing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So in terms of children in our school system, does ECE monitor literacy levels amongst any or all of the grade levels to track trends over time to see if it's getting better or worse? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, through our Alberta curriculum, when we were working with Alberta on all of our curriculum across the territory, ECE monitored literacy levels through the annual administration of the Alberta achievement tests. Those tests were done in, I believe, grade 6 and grade 9, so that we would have kind of a baseline and then you would follow students and be able to test them again and see where they were at. And those began in 2007.
With our transition to BC, we will eventually have the BC foundational skills assessments across grades 4 and 7 and graduation assessments across grade 10 and 12, which will assess student achievement and literacy and numeracy as well.
So one of the things that I think is important here is our Alberta achievement testing data trends showed little change over time and that contributed to our decision as well to switch to the BC curriculum. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Final supplementary. Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So beyond switching to the BC curriculum, does the department have a plan to improve literacy amongst our NWT students? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, currently all of our regional district education councils and district education authorities each have their own literacy programs that they employ within their schools. In addition to that, our NWT adapted curriculum, through our English language arts curriculum, is also conducive to pedagogy for learning to read for our NWT students as well. ECE does plan to transition the adapted NWT version to BC's school curriculum and the implementation of BC's large-scale assessment tools as well. And these will be an integral part of improving student learning for the Northwest Territories. And so it allows us to really encourage deeper learning among students, and a lot of the success of that is based on project-based learning, which we know that students thrive in. And so I'm really excited to see the full kind of conversion to BC curriculum for all NWT students. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Oral questions. Member for Monfwi.
