Budget processes

As part of this study, we also examined the way in which each of the provinces constructed their budgets, to see if there was a pattern to the consideration of outcomes or outputs in their budget processes.

We interviewed 28 budget officers from 12 provinces and territories, including 12 people who worked for central budget authorities and 16 people who worked for education departments delivering K-12 programming.

We were surprised to learn that data on school performance was routinely collected and analysed in only four of the 12 jurisdictions that we examined. Even more surprising, we discovered that only one of these four jurisdictions routinely considered performance data in the budget process.

In other words, education authorities do not appear to be making funding decisions based on any data about student achievement. It is not a great surprise, then, that in many cases, it appears that they are not maximizing the results they are achieving for the dollars they spend.

There may be many reasons why some public school systems seem to be better at generating student results than some others but, at least among the provinces, one of the reasons may be simply that no one is asking the system to use its funding as efficiently or as effectively as they can.