EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
20
YEARS
Center for
Universal Education
at BROOKINGS
EDUCATION
TRANSFORMATION IN
BRITISH COLUMBIA
AMELIA PETERSON
CASE STUDY | FEBRUARY 2023
AMELIA PETERSON is part of the founding faculty at the London Interdisciplinary School.
| Executive summary
This case study describes an ongoing systemic effort
to transform the learning experiences of young people
in British Columbia through curriculum reform.¹ British
Columbia lies on the western coast of Canada and is
its third largest province at around 5.1 million people.
Public education in Canada is an entirely devolved
responsibility of the provinces. The school system is
"co-governed" by the Ministry of Education and the
district school boards, with the ministry providing the
framework for curriculum and assessment.
Over the past decade, British Columbia has undergone
substantial reform to its central curriculum and
assessment framework. This reform was not framed
1
in terms of raising overall achievement levels, and
instead explicitly aimed toward making education more
relevant, engaging, and fit for a changing world. While
reducing attainment gaps between non-Indigenous
and First Nations students was an explicit goal, more
broadly reform leaders aimed to bring Indigenous
thinking into the curriculum and culture of schooling in
ways that would benefit all students.
At the level of the curriculum, the reform involved
reducing the number of curricular standards and
introducing a framework centered on subject-based
"big ideas" and cross-subject "core competencies:"
communication, thinking, and personal and social
competency. Subject-based provincial exams, taken
in grades 10-12, have been removed and replaced by
new literacy and numeracy assessments that prioritize
This case study is a companion to "Transforming education for holistic student development: Learning from education system (re)
building around the world" (Datnow et al., 2022), a summary report that explores the work of building and rebuilding education systems
to support holistic student development in six education systems in Singapore, Ireland, Chile, Canada, India, and the United States
and in one cross-national system (the International Baccalaureate). While different in many ways, the seven systems bear remarkable
similarities in their efforts to (re)build education systems-each is working in policy contexts pressing for academic quality and equity,
while also facing additional incentives to support holistic student development.
EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
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