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Barbara Silva, a spokeswoman for SOS Alberta, said not having that standardized reporting could be problematic.

“It removes a lot of transparency,” she said. “It removes a lot of accountability and it makes it that much more difficult for public education advocacy organizations like ours to be able to question the data.”

Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said she is in the process of developing a new group to look at better addressing the issue of class size.

Until then, school authorities will have to track class sizes themselves.

“We did the class size audit and we discovered that over 15 years, we had spent $3.4 billion but it hadn’t really moved the needle at all in class sizes,” she said. “What we really realized as well was that it was a failed grant and the reporting was tied to a failed grant.”

LaGrange said the group will consist of education partners who will look at the complexities in the classroom.

Silva said the funding initiative was an easy target for the UCP to cut as it looked to keep education funding at $8.2 billion. She criticized the review, which is what the government is basing its decisions on, as being “lazy, inaccurate and actually flawed.”

NDP education critic Sarah Hoffman said she was disappointed but not shocked by the news. She stressed missing a single year of standardized reporting is important.

“When you are pushing big cuts onto schools and onto districts, I’m not surprised that you don’t want people to know the evidence,” Hoffman said. “That’s having a negative impact on the enrolment of students and class sizes. This is a year where we are seeing big cuts. If you don’t collect and you don’t standardize it and don’t report it, it says it doesn’t matter to you. It certainly matters for parents I talk to.”