Education was one of the four sectors explicitly named in the government’s 2016 announcement of transformational change, alongside health care, transportation, and other public services. Nearly a decade later, the question the announcement raised is still unresolved: transformation toward what, and for whose benefit?

Classroom funding decisions rarely make dramatic headlines the way hospital closures or library shutdowns do, but their effects are just as consequential, and in many ways harder to reverse once the damage has accumulated over several school years.

Why classroom funding is harder to see than other cuts

When a library closes, the closure is visible: a locked door, a community meeting, a news story. When school division funding is quietly reduced or held flat while costs rise, the effects show up more gradually, in larger class sizes, fewer educational assistants, delayed building maintenance, and reduced access to specialized supports for students with learning disabilities or additional needs.

Because these effects accumulate slowly and unevenly across different school divisions, it can be difficult to build the same kind of immediate, unified public pressure that forced reversals on library funding in 2017. Education funding erosion tends to be a slower, quieter process, which makes sustained public attention even more important, not less.

The real cost of larger class sizes

Class size is one of the clearest, most direct ways that funding decisions translate into classroom experience. When school divisions face funding pressure, one of the most common responses is to increase the number of students per classroom, either by combining classes or reducing the number of teaching positions relative to enrollment growth.

Larger class sizes make it harder for teachers to give individual students the attention they need, particularly students who are struggling, who have learning disabilities, or for whom English is not a first language. Over time, larger class sizes can widen achievement gaps between students who have additional support available to them outside of school and those who do not.

Educational assistants and specialized supports

Educational assistants provide critical support for students with disabilities, behavioural needs, and other learning challenges that require more individualized attention than a classroom teacher alone can typically provide. When funding tightens, EA positions are frequently among the first to be reduced, because their absence is less immediately visible to the public than a school closure, even though the impact on the specific students who rely on that support can be severe.

A student who loses access to an educational assistant does not simply receive a slightly reduced level of support. In many cases, they lose the specific accommodation that made full participation in the classroom possible at all, with consequences that can follow them through the rest of their education.

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Rural schools and the consolidation question

Like health care, education funding pressure in Saskatchewan often intersects with the province’s rural-urban divide. Smaller rural school divisions, serving fewer students across greater distances, face persistent pressure toward consolidation, closing smaller schools and busing students to larger, centralized facilities.

Consolidation can generate administrative efficiencies, but it also lengthens student commute times, weakens the connection between a school and its immediate community, and can accelerate the broader decline of small towns that lose their school as an anchor institution, following a pattern similar to what happens when a small town loses its hospital or its library branch.

The teachers absorbing the gap

As with health care, funding pressure in education does not only affect students directly. Teachers absorb much of the strain created by larger class sizes, reduced support staff, and stagnant resources for classroom materials. Persistent funding pressure has been a recurring factor in labour tension between the province and its teachers, reflecting a broader concern that the system is being asked to do more with less, indefinitely, without a clear plan for sustainable long-term investment.

Teacher retention and recruitment challenges, particularly in rural and northern Saskatchewan, are closely tied to these funding pressures. A system that consistently underfunds the conditions teachers work in will eventually struggle to attract and keep the skilled educators that quality education depends on.

What durable investment in education requires

Reversing the slow erosion of classroom funding requires more than a single budget correction. It requires a sustained, multi-year commitment to funding that keeps pace with enrollment growth, inflation, and the increasingly complex needs of Saskatchewan’s student population, including a growing number of English language learners and students requiring specialized support.

It also requires treating education, like health care and libraries, as core public infrastructure rather than a line item to be adjusted based on the province’s resource revenue in any given year. Saskatchewan’s children move through the school system only once. Funding decisions made during a temporary fiscal downturn can have effects that follow an entire cohort of students well into their adult lives, long after the province’s finances have recovered.