Classroom crisis: Ontario student, teacher disparity to ‘widen’ more, internal document warns

Documents prepared to brief the education minister predict a growing population and retirements will lead to a growing gap between the number of teachers and students in Ontario.

Unions are warning the province that a teaching crisis has already hit Ontario as internal government documents show the new education minister was warned to expect the gap between the number of teachers and students to “widen” beginning in 2027.

Briefing documents written for Todd Smith when he became Ontario’s education minister for a matter of weeks over the summer, and obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws, paint a worrying picture of school staffing across the province.

“Many Ontario school boards have identified challenges with the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers,” one sentence says as part of a broader explanation of the province’s growing staffing problems.

“Modelling projects that student enrolment over the coming years is expected to increase along with teacher retirements, while the supply of new teachers is to remain stable, absent intervention,” Smith, who resigned in August to be replaced by Jill Dunlop, was told.

“These factors are projected to result in a growing gap between the number of teachers needed and the number of teachers available. This project gap is expected to widen beginning in 2027.”

That sentence, Ontario NDP education critic Chasma Parma said, fails to lay out the gravity of the situation in classrooms.

“This is an area where I wish I could write the minister’s briefing binder because they’ve significantly underplayed the problem here — the teaching shortage is already a massive problem,” she told Global News.

“This is an ongoing problem already — now, that we have to address now. It’s not going to be a problem three years from now.”