Ontario schools are falling behind in preparing students for future jobs and adulthood, according to a new report by People for Education published Tuesday.

The province has a policy to support students, from kindergarten to Grade 12, for career and life planning, but schools are struggling to implement it, says the report called Roadmaps and Roadblocks, which is based on survey results from 1,254 principals.

“You can write really, really great policy, but you have to make sure you’ve got a really strong implementation plan to make sure that it really happens on the ground,” says Annie Kidder, executive director of the research and advocacy group. “It’s time to go and hold consultations with school administrators to understand and address the barriers that they’re experiencing.”

The policy called Creating Pathways to Success was introduced in 2014 to prepare students for a complex and rapidly changing world. It’s supposed to help students better know themselves, explore opportunities, set goals, and make transitions and to develop skills in areas such as social and emotional development, resiliency and problem solving.

But Kidder says “Ontario is falling behind” because it isn’t embedding these skills into the curriculum — unlike other provinces, such as British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec.

Principals report challenges implementing this policy because of competing priorities, not enough guidance counsellors and insufficient professional development.

When it comes to counsellors “they’re very thinly spread,” says one of the report’s authors, Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, an assistant professor of Law and Society at Wilfrid Laurier University.

She notes just 23 per cent of elementary schools have counsellors and that there is “very wide variation” across the province, with schools in northern and eastern Ontario having far fewer counsellors than in the GTA. And, she notes, while almost every single high school has at least one part-time counsellor, the average ratio is 375 students to one counsellor. And in 10 per cent of high schools, the ratio is as high as 687 to one.

Twelfth grader Amin Ali, a student trustee with the Toronto District School Board, took a co-op course, which he describes as his favourite high school course, because the counsellor urged him to pursue it. He says the workplace experience, in a local politician’s office, helped him develop key skills, such as time management, communication and decision-making.

“One of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve had, in my own journey to finding my own career path, was the opportunity to do co-op,” says Ali, who hopes to pursue public administration in university.

The report also notes that under the policy, it’s mandatory for every student in Grades 7 to 12 to have an Individual Pathways Plan (IPP), which is an online planning tool to help them make education and career goals and is supposed to be updated twice a year, with the help of guidance counsellors, teachers and parents. But only 74 per cent of elementary schools with Grades 7 and 8, and 57 per cent of high schools, say all of their students have an IPP.

Also, according to the policy, high schools are required to have a Career/Life Planning Program Advisory Committee, comprised of teachers, administrators, guidance counsellors, parents and community members. But just 34 per cent of high schools have them.

The report also says Grade 8 students, and their parents, may not be getting enough information about whether to choose applied or academic courses for Grade 9, which is troubling because such decisions “may have long-lasting consequences.” It notes that students in applied courses are less likely to graduate from high school, and fewer than half go on to college.

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Bruce Lawson, president of The Counselling Foundation of Canada, which funded the report, says Ontario’s policy “rates amongst the best in Canada, but unfortunately it has not been well implemented.”

Among the report’s recommendations are that the province evaluate the funding for guidance counsellors and clarify their role, improve resources to support professional development focused on career and life planning, ensure parents and Grade 8 students have enough information about course choices before they start high school and eliminate applied courses in Grade 9 by the fall of 2020.