Alberta welcomed over 90,000 students into education system

Posted on October 1, 2026 by admin

By Heather Cameron
Westwind Weekly News

During a Rural Media Roundtable on Sept. 10, Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides emphasized that with a new school year comes new supports from the Government of Alberta.

Within the last four years, Minister Nicolaides explained, Alberta welcomed over 90,000 students into their education system and many of those students have come with ‘diverse learning needs.’

“That growth has resulted in some serious space crunches in many of our classrooms, particularly in our fastest-growing communities,” said Minister Nicolaides. 

To help alleviate that pressure, Minister Nicolaides further explained, the Government of Alberta created a new class size reduction grant and invested $200 million to this new fund with a goal of hiring more than 1,400 new teachers in K-9 classrooms.

Through this grant, Minister Nicolaides stated, school boards throughout the province have already hired almost 11,000 new teachers to start this new school year, and 450 of those new teachers have been hired outside of Calgary and Edmonton.

Minster Nicolaides stated that to further help address student increase, the Government of Alberta delivered a ‘historic’ seven per cent increase to education funding, something that was part of Budget 2026.

“This historic amount of education funding is allowing us to deliver in three major areas for Alberta families: First and foremost, more classroom supports, secondly, more teachers, and thirdly, more schools in our communities,” said Minister Nicolaides.

Classroom complexity, Minister Nicolaides explained, is one of the reasons why supports have been put in place.

“Our teachers and our school boards have told us very clearly that a major challenge they’re facing and experiencing in the classroom is classroom complexity, and that’s why in the Fall of 2025, we undertook the largest data collection exercise in Alberta history and collected data from 108,000 classrooms,” said Minister Nicolaides. “This data helped us pinpoint which classrooms across Alberta have the most complex students. And in response, we invested $218 million to create 699 classroom complexity teams. These teams will now work directly alongside teachers in our classrooms to help address diverse learning needs and give students more focused time and attention.”

To date, Minister Nicolaides stated, Alberta school boards have created 566 complexity teams, bringing hundreds of new staff into the classroom and 211 of these teams are in our urban and rural areas outside of Edmonton and Calgary. In addition to that, Minister Nicolaides reiterated, the Government of Alberta has invested $25 million for staff training specifically for rural and remote communities and some of that funding will go towards helping rural and remote school divisions in the province and pay the increased costs associated with bringing other specialized staff out to their communities to help support students.

In total, Minister Nicolaides also stated, provincial funding for complexity and class size reduction has enabled the hiring of over 2,100 new teachers and over 1,000 Educational Assistants with more to come.

Supporting students in Alberta, Minister Nicolaides emphasized, also means making sure that there is enough classroom space.

Through an $8.6 billion Schools Now Program, Minister Nicolaides said, the Government of Alberta is opening eight new school projects that are scheduled to start this year, projects that will deliver almost 6,000 classroom spaces. Five of these eight projects are outside of Edmonton and Calgary, Minister Nicolaides says, and include projects in Brooks, Raymond, Lethbridge, Evansburg, and Acme. In total, the Government of Alberta has 156 active school projects underway, Minister Nicolaides added, with 85 of them being added in the last two years and 43 of them being outside of Calgary and Edmonton.

Those projects, Minister Nicolaides noted, will take time to bring together, so the Government of Alberta is investing $200 million in modular classrooms this year alone to deliver 6,000 student spaces in classrooms.

“I know that these investments will go a long way to help address the challenges in our education system, but I also know change won’t happen overnight,” said Minister Nicolaides. “I am confident, though, that students, teachers, and parents will see the impact of more support from their government this school year. I’m confident that they’ll see more in-class supports, more teachers, and more classrooms.”

Minister Nicolaides also made reference to the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, stating that those ranking show that students continue to rank the top in Canada and top in the world when it comes to reading, writing, and math.

“You can count on the government to continue to invest in keeping our education system world-class,” said Minister Nicolaides. 

That, Minister Nicolaides explained, is why the government has invested the way it has, with those investments including the Schools Now Program, a program intended to accommodate the growth.

“I have been encouraged by the rate at which our school divisions have been able to staff these new positions,” said Minister Nicolaides. “We just announced a significant portion of the complexity funding in June, and here we are in September, and as it currently stands, 81 per cent of all of the complexity teams that we want to create are fully staffed We have 2,100 new teachers after we made commitments in Bill 2 to hire 3,000 new teachers over the course of 3 years, and we’re already well underway, so I’ve been encouraged by the rate of hiring, and the, the ability of our school divisions to staff up.”

The support for unique learning needs, Minister Nicolaides stressed, includes increasing support for Program Unit Funding, a program that supports students with severe language delays and other disabilities, by six percent in this budget cycle alone. 

Such achievements, however, are not without challenges, Minister Nicolaides said, and one of those challenges is that there is a lot of growth in the cities and that is creating demand for brand new schools and balancing meeting those demands with trying to keep up with aging infrastructure is a lot of pressure, but the government is working to balance those priorities effectively.

“Part of the Schools Now program is not just to build new schools, but also to modernize and replace schools,” explained Minister Nicolaides. “We hope to be able, through the program, to modernize or replace about 8 to 10 schools every year in addition to building new ones.”

However, Minister Nicolaides cautioned, school divisions submitted requests for over 440 projects across the province last year, and the province does not have the means to fulfill all the requests, those means including funding, construction resources, and that only allows for the approval of 30 projects per year, which is less than 10   percent of the requests.

Minister Nicolaides explained that the challenges facing Alberta’s system has been driven primarily by a substantial increase in immigration levels, something that began in 2022 and moved into 2023. Recently, though, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has scaled back immigration, but the province is still committed to doing their best for everyone, Minister Nicolaides stated.

“Everyone who is legally entitled to be in Canada and has a legal immigration status has the right and will receive an education,” said Minister Nicolaides. “If there are individuals, however, who are not here with, legal immigration status, I think that’s another matter. But all those temporary residents, temporary foreign workers, permanent residents, citizens, anyone who has legal status to be here as provided by Canada Immigration is entitled to full, high-quality education without any caveats.”