Manitoba teachers list class sizes, complexity of needs as top concerns in new survey

Manitoba teachers are sounding the alarm over the increasing pressures they’re facing in the classroom.

Manitoba teachers say supports and resources are failing to keep pace with the size and increasingly complex needs of their classrooms, impacting the time they can spend teaching.

The findings come from a census-style survey of roughly 3,400 Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS) members.

According to its findings, 81 per cent of educators indicated class size, complexity and lack of supports were their top concerns, while 80 per cent said classroom complexity has increased over the past five years.

“We have students who have a variety of different reading levels in our classrooms,” explained MTS president Lillian Klausen.

“We have students who have experienced trauma. They have mental health concerns, anxiety. They have depression. We have students who are gifted, whose education levels far exceed the expectations in the classroom.”

Roughly 48 per cent of teachers reported having six or more students with complex needs in their classrooms. That’s up from 8.1 per cent in 2017 and 23 per cent in 2024.

Conversely, teachers reported an “erosion” of supports like educational assistants, psychologists, and social workers. Seventy-eight per cent of teachers surveyed said students are not receiving the supports they require, while 63 per cent reported a decline in educational assistant supports.

“Now teachers in a classroom are becoming the counsellors and social workers and have all of these roles that they’re undertaking that they used to have a team of people to help them with before,” Klausen said.

As a result, MTS said teachers are constantly adapting just to maintain basic classroom function, often at the expense of teaching time.

Across all responses, teachers said behaviour management has become a dominant part of the day, affecting the learning for all students. MTS said this is especially true in early years classrooms.

To address these concerns, MTS called on the province to increase funding in a push to bring down class sizes and add more educational assistants and divisional clinicians.

“If there are further announcements coming from the government for funding, we want to get a piece of that to address some of these concerns,” Klausen said.

Manitoba Education Minister Tracey Schmidt told reporters on Monday she hopes to meet with MTS to learn how concerns revealed in the survey can be addressed.

She pointed to $3 million in annual funding aimed at keeping Manitoba class sizes small, plus the roughly 800 more teachers hired since the NDP formed government.

Still, she said money and resources are dispersed at each school board’s discretion.

“We’re going to work with our school division partners to make sure that they’re putting those resources in the best place, so sometimes that’s going to be a teacher. Sometimes, that’s going to be an EA. Sometimes that might be a clinician, a school psychologist,” she explained.

The survey was conducted by Probe Research between Jan. 22 and Feb. 17. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.54 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

- With files from CTV’s Scott Andersson