A Fair Deal for Students

The BCTF’s current campaign argues that a fair deal for teachers means better classroom conditions for our kids. It is a message born out of urgency. It reflects a profession pushed to its limits and an education system on the brink of collapse. Teachers are raising the alarm the only way they can within the structures available to them. Their desperation should not be dismissed. But the campaign also shines a light on how deeply we have come to rely on bargaining to fix problems that are not labour issues at all. They are human rights issues.

While well-intentioned, the message still frames student needs as a secondary outcome of labour improvements. It risks reinforcing the idea that inclusion is a contractual matter rather than a legal obligation the system owes to students. If we truly care about the conditions children learn in, we cannot limit the conversation to bargaining cycles or contract language. We must demand a public education system that upholds equitable access to education.  

Because students deserve a fair deal of their own.

For years, class size and composition have become the shorthand for what is wrong in public education. These issues matter deeply, but they have come to stand in place for something much bigger. Inclusion has been pushed into a structure that was never designed to hold it. Instead of redesigning the system to support disabled students, we continue to add band-aid fixes, insufficient funding, and reactive models of support, hoping it will be enough.

This is especially visible in the growing argument that the government should fulfill its campaign promise to put an EA in every K–3 classroom. The promise is appealing because it sounds immediate and concrete, but it reinforces a long-standing misconception that the primary barrier facing disabled students is a lack of adult supervision. Adding an EA to every early-years classroom does not redesign inclusion. It does not address inaccessible curriculum, unmanageable caseloads for specialist teachers, inconsistent service delivery, or the systemic beliefs and biases that continue to place the responsibility for inclusion on individual educators rather than on the system itself.

Teachers feel this tension every day. They are doing their absolute best inside a system stretched beyond its limits, and collective agreements have become the only place where change even feels possible. But collective agreements are not where these changes should live. They cannot transform the policies, attitudes, and structural decisions that shape how inclusion is understood and enacted. They cannot shift a culture built on scarcity, optics, and reactive decision making. They cannot create the shared accountability needed to remove the barriers that deny disabled students access to their education.

Teachers want better for their students, and their advocacy comes from a place of deep care and professional integrity. The problem is not their intentions but the impossible load they are asked to carry inside a system that has not been redesigned to meet the needs of disabled students. Bargaining becomes the tool because it is the only tool the system provides. Their campaign is not misguided in its purpose, but it is limited by the narrow set of mechanisms the system has offered them.

A fair deal for students does not oppose teachers’ efforts. It expands them. It invites teachers into a unified movement that extends beyond contracts and strengthens their voice in shaping a system that truly supports every child.

The challenges facing disabled students demand commitments that bargaining was never meant to deliver. They require stable, needs-based funding that does not fluctuate with labels. They require more specialist teachers, predictable access to assessment and learning services, and built-in time for collaboration with colleagues, families, and students themselves. They require policies that are enacted with accountability, not left to improvisation. They require a system deliberately designed to support human diversity rather than patched together with temporary fixes.

None of this is about convenience. It is about whether students can access their education in consistent, meaningful, and dignified ways.

This is why the fight cannot begin and end with a contract. When bargaining closes, the structural barriers remain. Disabled students will still be sent home, still be placed on shortened days, still be unsupported in classrooms built around a design that does not fit their bodies or their needs. 

A fair deal for students is the message that must continue long after collective agreements are settled, because the collapse teachers are warning about does not end when negotiations end. Their advocacy signals the breaking point of a system that can no longer meet its obligations and that is precisely why we need a rights-based movement that does not disappear when a deal is signed.

A fair deal for students shifts the conversation from what individual classrooms can manage to what the entire system must commit to. It strengthens public education for every student. It reminds us that inclusion is not something we negotiate. It is something we build.

A fair deal for teachers matters.
A fair deal for students is essential.
And the future of public education depends on recognizing that teachers’ desperation is not the cause of the crisis, it is the warning. The solution is not a better contract. It is a better system.