Does Alberta spend the least, per-student, on public schools? Maybe not. But it’s definitely down there

March 2, 2025 Canuck

You might not expect the Alberta Teachers’ Association and the Fraser Institute, a right-leaning think tank, to agree on much.

But there is one thing that both organizations independently concluded: Alberta spends the least, per student, on public schools of any province.

“For the fourth year in a row, our province has landed squarely at the bottom of the national list for per-student funding — and the gap between Alberta and the national average continues to grow,” the ATA said in a recent release.

The Fraser Institute came to the same result in a report it published last year: “In 2012/13, Alberta had the third highest per-student spending among the ten provinces. Ten years later, the province ranked last in the same category.”

Both organizations used Statistics Canada data to come to these conclusions.

But Statistics Canada, itself, urges caution when interpreting its data in this way.

That’s because precisely calculating per-student funding for public schools across every province in a consistent and comparable manner is a trickier than you might expect.

The federal agency does its own calculations on per-student funding, but it lumps private schools in along with public schools. It also applies a lot of behind-the-scenes calculations to make sure its comparisons are as apples-to-apples as possible, both between provinces and internationally.

The StatsCan figures put Alberta near — but not necessarily at — the bottom, in terms of per-student spending for primary and secondary education, including private schools, in the most recent year for which this data is available.

OK, so what about public-school funding, specifically?

Statistics Canada doesn’t break that out from its total per-student calculations.

For years now, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) and the Fraser Institute have been making their own calculations for public schools only, using a variety of published StatsCan datasets.

But officials with StatsCan told CBC News it’s actually impossible with the available public-facing data to precisely calculate per-student funding for public schools and make truly accurate comparisons between provinces.

So we can’t say with certainty that Alberta’s per-student funding for public schools is the lowest, but what we can say is it’s among the lowest and there has been a general downward trend in education funding in this province.

Point of agreement: the trend

When you compare the ATA reports on public schools, the Fraser Institute reports on public schools, and the StatsCan reports on public and private schools combined, the per-student spending numbers are all a little different.

But there is one thing that all three reports have in common: the general trend in the Alberta-specific data.

You can see that trend mirrored in each of the lines in the chart below.

We selected 2015-16 as the start of this chart because Statistics Canada says there were changes to its methodology that year, and values from that point forward “should not be directly compared to previous years.”

All three reports show a similar decrease in per-student spending over a seven-year period.

These are also nominal figures — meaning they are not adjusted for inflation.

That means, in terms of the real purchasing power of the dollars being spent, there has been an even greater decline in per-student spending on education in Alberta.

(Both the ATA and the Fraser Institute also do inflation-adjusted calculations but they again use different methods, while coming to generally the same conclusions, so we’ll avoid throwing yet another set of numbers at you here.)

Similar numbers, different viewpoints

While the ATA and Fraser Institute agree in their calculations that Alberta’s per-student public education funding lags the other provinces, they disagree on what should be done about it.

The ATA has made Alberta’s low funding a central point of its advertising campaign, calling on the government to boost spending on public schools.

“A lack of funding has resulted in record-high class size and insufficient resources to support student needs,” reads one infographic from the campaign.

A yellow-hued photo illustration showing a child with his face buried in his hands and the tagline: "Alberta spends the least on education." — An image from an Alberta Teachers’ Association ad campaign calling on the provincial government to boost funding for public schools. (ATA)

The Fraser Institute, by contrast, looks at the numbers and suggests other provinces could learn from Alberta.

In an opinion article published last summer, one of the authors of the Fraser Institute report noted its analysis showed “Alberta now spends less per student than any other province” but “Alberta students scored second only to Quebec on their math skills” in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests.

“Even better, Alberta students scored highest in the country on their PISA reading and science assessments,” the article reads. “This is exactly the opposite of what we’d expect if less spending hurt student performance.”

The ATA, for its part, notes Alberta’s high average PISA scores are due to exceptionally strong scores from the top achievers, but that masks the fact that students at the low-scoring end are falling behind.

“Alberta has the highest level of achievement gap in the country,” the ATA wrote in a commentary last year. “In Alberta, the difference in math scores between the top and bottom 10 per cent of students is 257 points. The Canadian average gap is 244 points and every other province is below that.”

The fine print from StatsCan

All this might leave you wondering: Why doesn’t StatsCan just publish its own numbers on per-student spending on public schools?

The federal agency has several reasons for doing things the way it has done them, to date.

Officials who work on the education funding program with StatsCan told CBC News they developed their current methodology in consultation the Council of Ministers of Education, which accepted the methodology in 2017.

The methodology, which includes private-school spending, also aligns with international standards, and StatsCan reports its results to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

StatsCan says it uses a “consolidated spending” approach to look at a “holistic version” of education expenditures, including those at the school board level as well as “direct expenditures by provinces and territories.” (The ATA, by contrast, used a dataset that includes just school board expenditures.)

There are also complicating factors when it comes to the denominator of the per-student calculations, that is, the number of students enrolled in a given jurisdiction.

To align with international standards and make interprovincial comparisons more apples-to-apples, StatsCan says it’s not quite as simple as dividing expenditures by the number of students enrolled in school.

Rather, StatsCan looks at full-time equivalent enrolment, which accounts for students who attend part time, which it says can be a significant factor both at the pre-primary (kindergarten) level and at the secondary (high school) level, especially in vocational training programs.

High school students at Swan Valley Regional Secondary School work side-by-side with university students in a home builders' program that is part of the suite of vocational programs at the school. The division is asking the commissioners reviewing Manitoba's public education system to consider a four-day school week and a students' residence to help grow its vocational and technical offerings. — High school students at Swan Valley Regional Secondary School in Manitoba are seen practising their skills in a home-building program that was part of a suite of vocational programs at the school. (Submitted by Swan Valley School Division)

Further complicating the spending-per-student calculations is the fact that fiscal reporting periods and enrolment reporting periods don’t always match up.

StatsCan does complicated behind-the-scenes calculations to best align the financial data with the enrolment data, which it says is not possible with the publicly available data.

Whew. That’s all the fine print. Congratulations if you’ve read this far and absorbed the minutiae.

If you’ve only kind of scanned your way to this point and glossed over the finer details, don’t worry.

All this is to say: It may not be possible to assert with certainty that Alberta’s per-student spending on education is the lowest of all provinces, but it’s certainly among the lowest and has been on the decline.

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Canada News

Does Alberta spend the least, per-student, on public schools? Maybe not. But it’s definitely down there

Point of agreement: the trend

Similar numbers, different viewpoints

The fine print from StatsCan

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