Accelerating Indigenous Children’s Learning in Manitoba
Indigenous children’s early years are a key period for addressing inequities in educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) included a call to action for governments to ensure culturally appropriate early childhood education programmes to enhance young children’s development. The Commission also noted the importance of parenting support to address legacies from residential schooling, which generations of Indigenous parents experienced as children.
As part of an effort to address early inequities, the Manitoba provincial government established a tailored early childhood education and care centre in an impoverished urban neighbourhood in Winnipeg, aimed at ‘levelling the playing field’ for vulnerable children and their families. Approximately 50 percent of the children in the programme are from Indigenous families.
Children enter the centre at three months of age and attend five days a week, full-time, until they start school. Each child has a primary caregiver at the centre, whose role is to provide individualised, relationship-based care. The focus is on language development, which supports greater subsequent cognitive and social-emotional development.
Engagement with children’s families is an important part of the programme, both to support parents in enhancing their children’s development and learning and to address any barriers or issues that families may be facing. Engagement with families is strength-based and occurs through regular home visits, involving parents in the centre, a monthly parent support group and a co-located drop-in resource centre.
Recognition of Indigenous cultures is also a key aspect of the programme. An Indigenous Programme Co-ordinator is on-staff, and Indigenous art, knowledge and cultural practices are woven into the day-to-day environment. Staff are drawn from the local community, including Indigenous staff, which helps to strengthen the connections with families and the community and keeps staff turnover relatively low.
Children’s language development is regularly tracked, alongside children in a control group from the same community. As illustrated in figure 14 below, the positive benefits of the programme over a two year period are slightly higher for Indigenous children than non-Indigenous children, although both groups of children make considerable learning gains in comparison with the control group.