Premier Danielle Smith stated that she doesn't believe enforcing classroom caps for students would work."If we look at the number of teachers who are in class right now, there's 35,162 teachers, so that doesn't include substitutes, but 7,800 substitutes, and there's admin, and there's some vice principals, and there's a whole other categories," Smith stated at a press conference Wednesday. "So, 35,162, and if we have 740,000 students, then that's 21 to one."She questions, "So we should already be able to have class sizes of 21 and so we have to kind of look into, why don't we?""What is actually going on there?".Alberta student population statistics show in the Public school system for the 2024/2025 school term, there was a total of 537,678 students. According to Statistics Canada, the number of full time teachers employed during the 2016 to 2017 school term (the most recent term available) was 34,296 teachers. "It isn't administration from what we can see. And so what we did see in the NDP time was they spent $2 billion trying to get class sizes down, and were never successful at it," stated Premier Smith. "I think it's because we have to have a common understanding of what it is we're trying to achieve, and we also have to understand why the resources that we have are not being allocated in the way we would expect.""That's what we need to look into."."Maybe the issue is that we have to add more educational assistants, until you get to a point where you say, you know what? This is.""Just too many complex needs kids for one teacher.""Those are the things I think we need to maintain the flexibility to do, because I do believe that's going to get us to the solution that teachers are actually looking for.""When you see a 'cap on complexity', what do you mean by that? I don't know.""I mean, that's something that I hope that we can talk to the teachers about, because that's a concept that my education minister has put forward — do we have to be a lot more hands-on in monitoring the complexity in the classroom?".Wednesday marks day 10 of the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) being on strike.The ATA has begun bargaining once again with the Teachers’ Employer Bargaining Association (TEBA), on Tuesday.Both sides had previously agreed to move forward with a tentative deal in late September, before it was rejected by ATA members by a 90% margin.“The ATA’s rejected deal would have provided tremendous investments in classroom supports to help alleviate population growth and classroom complexity pressures with the hiring of 3,000 new teachers and over 1,500 new educational assistants in public, separate and francophone classrooms. This would have been in addition to the hiring required to replace retiring and departing teachers,” stated Finance Minister Nate Horner in a statement reacting to the rejection.
