Where Did All the Kids Go?

As Canada's population grows, some provinces' schools are seeing a net loss of students

There’s strange demographic stuff happening among school-aged kids in some of Canada’s murkier corners. Trigger alert: lots of numbers ahead.

Despite record immigration rates, Ontario had 10 percent fewer grade one students than grade 11 students in 2023. And the trend was fairly steady from grade to grade. So even if that year's grade one cohort turns out to be the tail end of the downward trend, by the time they graduate from high school, province-wide enrollment will have dropped by more than 200,000 students. That alone would have a catastrophic impact on school board funding and employment. But for all we know, the incoming student population might well continue its decline.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the trend isn’t exactly national. In 2022, there were two percent more grade one than grade 11 students across all of Canada. And Quebec had only 57,105 grade 11 students, compared with 85,896 kids in grade one, representing a potential for 33 percent growth.

The graph that follows shows how national K-12 enrollment hasn’t matched Canada’s overall rate of population growth. At first glance, this suggests that immigrants don’t seem to be bringing their school-aged children with them and that they’re adopting our low birth rates once they get here.

But that doesn’t explain why the Quebec and Ontario experiences are so different. To put it a different way, Ontario’s school enrollment peaked for children born around 2007, and has been declining ever since. But Quebec didn’t hit its peak births until 2014, and subsequent declines have been shallow.

When I compare Quebec’s enrollment numbers to its actual birth statistics, the ups and downs are a pretty good match. But Ontario is strange. Women living in Ontario gave birth to 140,424 children in 2016 and, by 2021, there were 138,509 kids enrolled in grade one. Close enough. But by 2021, the 138,436 births taking place in 2007 somehow translated to a total grade ten enrollment of 155,007. Where did all those extra kids come from?

The most obvious one word answer would be “immigration”. But that one word raises two problems:

• The numbers should be roughly the same in Quebec, where immigration rates are also high.

• According to Statistics Canada, only around 6.7 percent of Ontario’s 0-14 population was born outside Canada. That rate doesn’t account for the significantly higher 16,571 (11 percent) child gap between Ontario’s birth and enrollment numbers.

Quebec does attract immigrants with fewer children - only 5.2 percent of 0-14 year-olds in Quebec are born outside the country, as opposed to 6.7 percent in Ontario - so they’re not having the same impact on big-picture statistics. Perhaps you’ve got other theories you can share.

But I can tell you that the growth of the homeschooling movement might be playing a role in Ontario, at least. Statistics Canada data shows us that, across Ontario, there were 3,585 children of grade one age being homeschooled in 2006. By 2021, that number had more than quadrupled to 14,946 compared with 138,509 of children enrolled in grade one in-school classrooms.

The homeschooling numbers for grade 11 are noticeably lower in all jurisdictions. While there were more than 67,000 homeschoolers across the country in 2022, less than 1,400 of them were in grade 11. But that might have nothing to do with birthrates. Rather, I suspect that homeschooling is less likely to succeed for families facing the more complex material in the older grades.

So perhaps the mismatch between Ontario’s grade one and grade 11 enrollment is the result of a combination of early-grade homeschooling and a slight skewing of immigrant children towards older ages.

Or not. But either way, public schools are going to have to confront declining enrollment. Success will require they tighten their hiring and spending policies to manage reduced revenues and up their game to compete with the significant value of homeschooling.

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