Category Archives: Public education

After a summer of record breaking dryness, terrifying forest fires, and a long list of ridiculously unhinged policy decisions from our neighbours to the South, September has, at long last, arrived.

In the quiet moments of summer’s last gasp, schools are a magical place. Hallways hum with invisible energy, gymnasiums echo with the silent sound of last year’s competitions, performance spaces resonate with June’s final crescendos and buzz with the remnants of closing night applause. The entity that is your local public school holds its breath in anticipation of the arrival of the kids.

Then the doors open, the students rush in, and we are off to meet whatever heartbreaking, gut wrenching, soul fulfilling, awe inspiring moments await us in this, the most amazing of all professions.

This year, of course, will come with its share of triumphs and its challenges. So, as has been my penchant over the past few years, here is my list of items and issues that I believe will dominate educational discourse in the 2025-26 school year.

Teacher retention and recruitment

The issue of schools not having enough qualified teachers to fill classrooms is far from new. As early as 2015, alarm bells were being sounded about staffing shortages right around the globe. In the UK, the BBC reported that despite offering top B.Ed graduates bursaries of about $45,000 Canadian, teacher trainee programs had fallen thousands of teachers short of recruitment targets. In the US, a report on teacher attrition determined, “Roughly half a million U.S. teachers either move or leave the profession each year”. Australian experts were warning about potential “acute shortages” unless attrition rates were reduced and recruitment numbers improved.

Today, teacher shortages have become commonplace. Yet, even as this crises grows, governments continue to battle with teacher organizations, as evidenced by the current unrest in Alberta, where teachers are poised to strike. That particular tussle has been driven by a variety of factors, including lack-lustre pay increases, poor working conditions, and politically motivated policy decisions that directly impact teachers. The recent book banning debacle has done little to calm those turbulent waters.

Here in Nova Scotia, steps have been taken to try and mitigate the damage caused by chronic under-staffing of our schools, including the hiring of non-certified teachers and increasing the number of days retired teachers can fill in as substitutes. These efforts, however, have focused on recruitment as opposed to retention. With another round of bargaining set to open with the NSTU, we will see if both sides can work together to buck the current, and increasingly global, trends.

Violence in Schools

It would be difficult to talk about the retention and recruitment issues facing our schools without discussing the issue of school violence. The number and severity of violent incidents involving students has been on the rise over the past ten years, coinciding, somewhat suggestively, with the aforementioned staffing issues. An August, 2025 report by Global News in Ontario uncovered that violent incidents in that province have increased 77 percent since 2018. In 2024 Nova Scotia, Auditor General Kim Adair reported, that violent incidents in schools had increased by 60 percent over the previous seven years. Regardless of the size of the jurisdiction, school violence has become a topic of grave concern for educational stakeholders.

The Auditor General’s report did spur the Houston government into action, and during the first few days of the school year, teachers received training in the province’s new student code of conduct. The success of the document will, of course, come down to those supports being provided for the students, and to the extent to which front line decision makers are supported by their superiors.

What will also bear watching in the public response to both a firmer line being drawn in the sand by teachers, and an undoubted uptick in reporting, driven by improvements to that particular system. As probably the most complex and multifaceted element of teaching, student discipline and school violence will be a major topic of educational discourse this year.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence burst on the educational scene in November of 2022, and immediately established itself as the largest system wide disruption since the introduction of the calculator.

Students using AI to complete assignments is one obvious example of the new normal. Finding evidence of plagiarism in the work of students; (challenging before the advent of AI), has become the work of Sisyphus. Even with the use of such helpful tools as Revision History, teachers are finding it more and more challenging to separate student work from that of a readily accessible chat bot.

It is not just the work of students that will require some carefully considered AI guardrails, but also the work of teachers. Determining which AI tools are permissible for teacher use, how teachers intellectual property rights will be protected, even how teachers themselves will be protected from potentially damaging AI manipulation of their image and their voices are all part of this new world order. The issue of AI and it’s impact on teachers is rapidly becoming a hot button topic in contract negotiations as collective agreements play catch-up with the ever changing technology.

AI has the potential to have even far graver consequences for our students. Last year, a Florida mother launched a lawsuit against a company called Character Technologies alleging their chat bot encouraged her son to end his own life. This mirrors another lawsuit filed against ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI. In that case, a teenager became increasingly attached to the AI, eventually revealing feelings of anxiety and depression, and ultimately, suicide. When the boy typed in that he was considering taking his own life, the ChatGPT program thanked the teen for “being real” about the situation, and promised not to “look away from it.” The teen was found dead later on that day.

These incidents are not just heartbreaking, they are reality shattering. I’m not sure to what extent schools, (or any institutions for that matter), are equipped to help kids avoid being drawn into this particular vortex.

It won’t be long before schools settle into their daily routine. Now shiny floors will become scuffed, now neat rows of desk will be thrown asunder, and now smoothly working technology will, inevitably, start to sputter and stall.

But, at the moment, it’s September. A time of renewed hope, renewed energy, and for many teachers like myself, a renewed passion for the craft we truly do love, challenges and all.

Here’s wishing everyone involved in public education, staff and students alike, a wildly successful year.