Education Secretary Bernard Drainville says he is “surprised” to learn that struggling students are moving straight from Year 5 to Secondary 1 because they have repeated a year.
Posted at 2:42pm
Every year, more than a thousand young people with learning disabilities make the one-year jump because the law requires primary education to be completed in six years, La Presse announced on Tuesday. However, this path varies depending on where the students live in Quebec.
“I was very surprised by this story. We’re doing research to see first if it’s a common occurrence and then how we’re going to deal with it,” Mr Drainville said. The Ministry of Education does not know how many students in difficulty are sent to secondary school before completing primary school.
Visiting a primary school in Léry, Montérégie, with Prime Minister François Legault on Wednesday morning, Bernard Drainville discovered a so-called “new generation school”.
“When we started the first trimester [caquiste]I asked Jean-François Roberge to design a new school model, beautiful schools where there is more light, where we use wood and aluminium, where we have more common areas,” recalls Mr Legault.
“The most important thing is of course the staff. They are the teachers, but working in a beautiful context helps,” he continued.
This is the fourth school of this type to be built since 2019. In 2029, Quebec plans to have 135 of these facilities.