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Earlier this summer, the Director of an adult basic education program located outside Winnipeg contacted me to say that the latest round of cuts to provincial government funding for her program would result in a former full-time position being reduced to half time, and the number of adult learners admitted this September being cut in half. “This is heartbreaking for us,” she said. “I feel like giving up.”
Manitoba’s adult basic education system has been seriously underfunded for years. This was the case when the NDP were in office. It has worsened significantly since 2016 when the Conservatives took office. Total expenditures for adult basic education—Adult Learning Centres (ALCs) offering the mature high school program, and Adult Literacy Programs (ALPs) working to improve literacy and numeracy skills to a level sufficient to succeed in high school—have declined in real terms by 23 percent since 2016. Two respondents to the survey undertaken for the study soon to be published said “our funding is barebones,” and adult basic education has been “stripped to the bone in terms of funding.”
There are enormous opportunity costs to this austerity in adult basic education. This is clear with respect to poverty, reconciliation, family health and labour supply.
Manitoba has especially high poverty rates, including the highest child poverty rate of any province. Poverty produces enormous costs in worsened health and educational outcomes, for example. Adult basic education is proven to be an effective anti-poverty strategy.
Reconciliation is especially important in Manitoba, and education is an important part of reconciliation. As Justice Murray Sinclair has said, “education got us into this mess, and education will get us out of it.” This is especially so for adult education, since Indigenous adults participate in adult basic education at a rate about two and a half times their share of the population. Thus the failure to fund adult basic education adequately is a direct hit to reconciliation efforts.
Stronger and healthier families produce multiple benefits, primarily to the members of those families but also to the future of Manitoba, because stronger and healthier families are likely to produce children and youth who are physically and emotionally healthy, and willing and able to contribute to the collective undertaking of building a better society. Austerity limits the extent to which adult basic education can contribute to building stronger and healthier families.
Adult basic education can also play an important role in meeting Manitoba’s labour supply needs, since those adults who earn a high school diploma are much more likely to be employed, either immediately upon graduation or following post-secondary education.
Two studies published in 2022 and one in 2023 involved interviews with first 30, then 36 and finally 27 adult educators working in all parts of the province. The findings in all three studies are consistent. Austerity has been severe and of long duration in adult basic education. It has resulted in reductions in staffing levels, increased workloads and longer hours, high levels of stress and job dissatisfaction, reductions in the numbers of classes offered, class sizes much larger than what is best for adult learners, an inability to hire substitute teachers and therefore being forced to cancel classes when teachers are sick or at workshops, and the persistence of a large, unmet demand for adult education. The numbers enrolled in and graduating from ALCs and ALPs have declined by roughly 25 percent in the past two decades. The number of ALPs has declined by about 30 percent since 2009/10, even though a 2013/14 study found that there were approximately 192,600 adults in Manitoba with literacy levels so low they could not fully function in society.
If instead of austerity there were increased investment in adult education, many more Manitobans would be able to improve their education. Many would then be able to pull themselves out of poverty, with benefits not only for themselves and their families, but also for society, in terms for example of reduced pressure on our health care system and improved outcomes in K-12 education. Replacing austerity with investment in adult basic education would contribute to the very important process of reconciliation. Families would be strengthened. Labour supply shortages would be reduced.
Adult basic education produces multiple benefits. Austerity in adult education is short-sighted and disadvantageous to all in Manitoba.
Grant: Community-Driven Solutions to Poverty: Challenges and Possibilities - 2020-2027
Category: Education, Training, and Capacity Building