Nunavut hires more educators, gets fewer students, fewer grads: StatsCan

Inuksuk High School graduates line up to receive diplomas at their graduation ceremony in June 2013. (FILE PHOTO)

If you’re wondering how Nunavut’s education officials are doing, it’s simple: they’re hiring more educators but achieving less for their students, a Statistics Canada report reveals.

Nunavut schools employ more educators than ever before. But the StatsCan numbers show that student enrollment is down and the raw number of students who graduated in 2011-12 is lower than in 2008-09.

That’s from information contained in various tables connected to a recent StatsCan report on enrollment and graduate numbers across Canada, released Nov. 21.

In 2008-09, 9,277 students were enrolled in Nunavut schools, the StatsCan tables show. But by 2012-13, that enrollment number had fallen to 9,086.

Nunavut’s enrollment number fell by about one per cent.

But the territory’s population maintained a year-over-year population growth rate of 2.5 per cent over the same period.

Between 2008-09 and 2012-13, the number of Canadian students enrolled in an elementary or secondary public school also decreased annually, with a total reduction of 1.1 per cent during that five-year period.

The raw number of graduates from Nunavut schools also shrank between 2008-09 and 2012-13 — from 244 to 216.

And in 2012-13 only about 35 per cent of students enrolled in Grade 12 managed to graduate.

That’s worse than the graduation rate of 46 per cent claimed in a previous Department of Education report, which used earlier numbers for its calculation.

Other results that can be gleaned from StatsCan’s new tables: a big loss of Nunavut students between Grade 10 and Grade 12.

In 2009-10 there were 492 boys and 471 girls enrolled in Grade 10.

But in 2010-11 there were 354 boys and 402 girls in Grade 11, and, by Grade 12 in 2012-13, only 285 boys and 324 girls remained — a loss of 207 boys and 147 girls over those last three years of high school.

According to the tables, student retention remains stronger in the Northwest Territories during those final years of high school.

Since 2008, the number of educators employed by the Government of Nunavut has risen from 654 to 801.

But the NWT gets by with only 645.