Philpott – improving educational outcomes  

Newfoundland just concluded a Premier’s Task Force on Improving Educational Outcomes. The province recognized that we’re lagging in math, we’re lagging in reading, there’s an increase in referrals for mental health service, special education rates have gone through the roof and onwards from there. So they really wanted to do an investigation as to what was happening and how can we make improvements. And the report was just released, and I was involved in that. I was one of the authors. 

And my piece was mental health, student mental health and wellness, inclusive education and the early years. And we were able to argue that if you want to improve educational outcomes, waiting until a child turns six is too late. You’ve already lost. In fact, don’t even try. Start – if you want to really have lasting impact on education outcomes, you start in the early years. Because the early years are foundational. The early years are pre-emptive, as I said. And you really get lasting impact.  

That was a tough sell when I first started this nine months ago because educators weren’t there. Politicians weren’t there. No, no, the Early Years is about daycare. It’s about spaces. We need to increase the spaces. But we were able to argue that if you wanted to do something about reading, you have 40 percent of grade three children are leaving grade three unable to read. If you want to do something about that, go way back to when language starts to emerge and start to strengthen language development, right?  

Number one issue among classroom teachers is behavioural problems in the classroom. Students are out of control. Well let’s go way back and look at self-regulation and promoting self-regulation before they land in school. Mental health issues. Well of course students are identified with mental health issues in their adolescence because they’ve become so socially isolated, so frustrated and so dysregulated in their behaviour that we really need to go back and start looking at social development in young children, and the nature of play, the interactive – the interaction that occurs in children in their real environments.  

And I think the value of the report for me, I mean I think there’s 84 recommendations or something, but the value of the report is that that message got through. Oh yeah. They had an ‘ah-ha’ moment that they started to realize, yeah, the international research is right. If you want to look at these issues you start before school. You start before grade one and build that foundation.