Alberta is starting the new school year with $10.8 billion in education funding, an increase the province says will help schools accommodate the nearly 90,000 additional students who have entered the system over the past four years.
Premier Danielle Smith said the province’s unprecedented population growth is putting pressure on schools and other public services, but called the growth a “powerful vote of confidence” in Alberta.
“All of these fresh faces need more teachers, more education assistants, more classrooms, and more specialized supports from professionals,” Smith said.
The funding is up 7.2 per cent from the previous year and according to Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, represents the largest annual investment in Alberta’s history.
Nicolaides said government funding has supported the hiring of 2,127 teachers and 1,044 educational assistants ahead of the new school year.
The total includes 566 teachers assigned to classroom-complexity teams, 1,090 kindergarten-to-Grade 9 teachers funded through the $200-million Class Size Reduction Grant and 471 net new teachers hired through general recruitment in 2025-26.
According to Nicolaides, the province will use both quantitative and qualitative measures to determine whether the classroom-complexity teams it has added are working. This will include tracking how often teams are used, how frequently they intervene and how often they provide additional support to teachers and students.
The province also plans to gather feedback from teachers through surveys and conversations about whether the teams are effective.
“Those two measures will help make sure that they’re achieving their intended purpose,” Nicolaides said.
Alberta also announced $25 million for training and increased access to specialized services in rural and remote communities. The investments follow a provincewide data-collection exercise last fall that gathered information from more than 108,000 classrooms to identify where additional support was most needed.
Nicolaides said the data showed an average class size of 25 students across Alberta, while also identifying areas where enrolment pressures were particularly acute.
Smith also pointed to other changes coming to Alberta classrooms, including legislation passed in the spring aimed at keeping what the government describes as politics and ideology out of classrooms. The province has also introduced new standards for learning materials, saying they will ensure resources are age-appropriate and aligned with the curriculum.
“Parents can look forward to having a stronger voice in the system, and kids will get a great education based on an updated curriculum,” Smith said.
The premier said the goal is to ensure students return to school to find “more teachers, more education assistants, more classrooms, and more of our world-class education system.”
However, NDP education critic Amanda Chapman said the province’s latest investment in schools is not enough to address overcrowding, teacher shortages and increasingly complex classrooms.
Chapman said the UCP government’s latest spending announcement is an attempt to address what she described as years of underfunding. She argued Alberta now ranks last among the provinces in per-student education spending and that the government is trying to close that gap.
“What we heard today isn’t actually going to make a difference for students in the classroom today,” Chapman said “This one year of racing to catch up, it’s not going to fix a problem because it’s a huge problem that they’ve created.”
Chapman said the hiring announcements do not tell the whole story because the province does not publicly report how many teachers leave the education system each year. She argued that retention must be considered alongside recruitment when assessing whether the new hires will ease staffing pressures.
As well she added, Alberta has a serious teacher-retention problem, noting that as many as half of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years.
“We’ve got this really leaky bucket that’s happening and we are losing hundreds, thousands of teachers from the system every year.”
She questioned whether Alberta will be able to fill its remaining vacancies, saying teachers have options across Canada and many do not feel respected or consulted by the provincial government.
Chapman also questioned whether the new classroom-complexity teams will be large enough to meet demand, explaining provincial data identifies more than 65,000 classrooms as having medium or higher levels of complexity, meaning the teams would cover only a fraction of classrooms facing those challenges.
“School boards will absolutely take whatever resources they are given from this government, but certainly it is not going to be enough to address the need in a modern classroom.”
She stated the province needs a sustained increase in education funding rather than a single-year boost.
As well the education critic cited a 2025 Fraser Institute report that ranked Alberta last among provinces for per-student education spending. She put the figure at about $13,000 per student but said she did not have the precise figure available.
Funding however she said is only one part of the problem, arguing that working conditions and the government’s relationship with teachers also affect recruitment and retention.
Chapman also rejected the government’s focus on political neutrality in classrooms, stating she does not expect the new legislation to significantly change day-to-day teaching.
“This manufactured ideological crisis that the UCP is trying to sell as the prime problem in education simply is not the main problem in education,” Chapman said. “The problem is a government that doesn’t value and historically under resources the education system.”
She added that parents, teachers and students have raised concerns about overcrowding and a lack of support for students with complex needs, rather than political bias in classrooms.
Chapman argued that the government’s current spending does not compensate for what she described as years of cuts under the UCP.
