Students walk out of school to join a protest in support of pay for teachers and funding for schools at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton on Sept. 22, 2025.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
Tamara Kovitch’s 10-year-old daughter used to see a speech language pathologist at school three times a week to help with her dyslexia and dysgraphia, a neurological condition that affects writing ability.
Now, because of budget cuts, the pathologist only comes once every three weeks, she said. Her seven-year-old son has ADHD and also needs extra support – despite his teacher’s best efforts, he often struggles academically.
Children like hers are too often ignored in discussions about the Alberta teachers’ strike, Ms. Kovitch said, referring to parents who are calling for an end to the labour dispute over classroom conditions and wages.
“I see people on social media constantly saying that we’ve always had crowded classrooms. Which, yeah, maybe so, but they don’t know that the needs have changed inside those classrooms,” said Ms. Kovitch, an entrepreneur in Fort Macleod, south of Calgary.
Tamara Kovitch wants to see more supports for teachers.Supplied
Classroom complexity, often referred to as classroom composition, is one of the main issues in the negotiations between the Alberta teachers’ union and the province, along with salaries and class sizes.
Approximately 51,000 teachers in Alberta’s public, Catholic and francophone schools have been on strike since Oct. 6, affecting more than 700,000 students and their families across the province.
The Alberta Teachers’ Association announced Thursday it will be back at the bargaining table next Tuesday.
Increasingly, classes are composed of children with diverse needs, including learning difficulties such as ADHD, those on the autism spectrum, those with behavioural challenges and students who are learning English as a second language, the union says. However, it adds, teachers are not properly equipped to help them.
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“We have kids coming in to our classrooms who have complex needs and we don’t have the resources, like the programming, the educational assistants or the teachers to deal with those needs,” said Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association.
Other teachers’ organizations are also highlighting the challenges posed by complex classrooms, and say it affects student learning.
Protest signs outside the Alberta Teachers' Association in Edmonton on Monday. Teachers left the classroom after reaching an impasse in contract negotiations with the UCP government.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
“It is one of the most consistent issues across the country,” said Clint Johnston, president of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. He added that more teachers are leaving the profession “earlier and earlier because it’s difficult to watch students fall through the cracks.”
A CTF poll of nearly 5,000 educators across Canada, released earlier this year, reported that 77 per cent of respondents felt students’ needs have become “significantly more complex” compared to five years ago, before the pandemic.
Complexity is becoming a more frequent issue in collective bargaining across the country, said Larry Savage, a professor of labour studies at Brock University.
“Governments are being forced to bargain classroom complexity whether they like it or not,” Prof. Savage wrote in an e-mail.
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As an example, he pointed to the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation, which made the issue its top priority in 2023.
The organization launched a strike when the government refused to bargain on the matter and eventually, made historic gains, Prof. Savage said. The union negotiated a complexity fund of $20-million per year, as well as the hiring of additional teachers.
Classroom complexity and class size will also be top issues for the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario when it enters bargaining with the province next year, said union president David Mastin.
“Fewer students in a particular classroom gives us more of an opportunity to achieve the learning goals and expectations that each of the students in our class have,” he said.
Addressing classroom complexity in collective agreements can mean more power is ceded to teachers over the education system, says Jason Ellis, an associate professor in the department of educational studies at the University of British Columbia.
He said that when a collective agreement sets the class size, “teachers effectively control the number of teachers in the system.”
University of Alberta professor George Georgiou says studies show that reducing class size only has a measurable impact when the number of students is cut down to 15 per class.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
There are also practical difficulties of negotiating in Alberta, where there is a teacher shortage and overcrowded classrooms, says George Georgiou, an educational psychology professor at the University of Alberta.
“You will be creating additional classes in every single school. Where will you put those kids when the schools are already overcrowded?” he said.
Studies have shown that reducing class size only has a measurable impact when the number of students is cut down to 15 per class – a figure that is likely impractical for schools in Alberta or elsewhere, Prof. Georgiou said.
In the long term, addressing complexity will require hiring more teachers, more teaching assistants and building more schools, he added.
For now, Ms. Kovitch said she hopes the strike is resolved soon and that her kids can get the support they need to do well at school.
“I understand that this is a frustrating situation for everyone. But it’s not caused by my son or his teacher. It’s caused by the lack of supports here to actually help these kids get what they need to learn.”