(Photo: CPAC)

Premier Blaine Higgs says efforts to reform the education system for French learning have only just begun.

“If we continue with a two-tiered education system, we’re not going to get any better results than we have seen in the last 50 years. We have less than 30 per cent of our English students graduating as bilingual, so my point is, we can do better than that.”

He adds, we are a bilingual province, and we need to live up to that.

“The education system has a very severe streaming where we see kids being separated and moved into one element of the classroom and another or school and another and another portion of the school, and we see very much a behavioural issue. Many of the teachers in the English system have great ideas. But unfortunately in these sessions rather than kind of get to the root cause of how we fix this, it becomes a shouting session and it becomes distracted in terms of what is the real point,” Higgs says.

The Premier says he is hopeful that the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association will play a key role in things moving forward.

“The goal was for everyone would speak conversational French or conversational English, but be able to converse in either official language anywhere in the province. Unless we get to critical mass to do that, we will never really succeed,” Higgs adds.