Caroline Cochrane

Mr. Speaker, the transformational changes we have been making across the education system are gaining momentum to help fulfil this government's mandate commitments towards education renewal.

Under the Skills 4 Success strategy, grades nine to 12 students and youth aged 18 to 24 across the North will soon have access to career and education advisors. The Department of Education, Culture and Employment has already hired six to work with students to help them navigate their best academic path from "classroom to career."

The career and education advisors have been hired for initial two-year terms...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The act for the status of women actually was a priority. It was one that I had actually identified when I first began my position as Minister of Status of Women. However, at that time, working with the NWT Status of Women Council, they felt that it was appropriate that it didn't need any changes. Since that time, there has been a total change in administration and chairs. They have looked at it again, and they are in agreement with me that it needs to be changed, but, because it is so late in the day, we have agreed to put it onto the 19th Legislative Assembly. It does...

As stated before, we do have a deputy ministers committee, as well as a Committee-of-Cabinet to work with the economy. We still have work to do. Major projects, such as when we look at mines, socio-economic agreements, et cetera, we sit together. The Ministers actually sit together at the table and discuss what we need. Those are put into things such as socio-economic agreements.

All of the departments, when it comes to capital needs, believe me, we are all at that table. We all have our own interests in that process, though, I think, maybe more so than working collaboratively together. What we...

I want to acknowledge the MLA for actually talking about some of the things that we have done, because it's nice to hear in the House. We have a lot of work to do, but it's also nice to recognize that we are working at things, so thank you for that comment.

What are we doing? We have developed our measurement plan. It is already done. Some of the indicators that we have been looking at: we will be measuring stakeholder satisfaction with the program, that is normal; the number of apprentices that are registered and that are certified under the program; and the number and the type of new trades...

Mr. Speaker, many factors impact a child's life, both negatively and positively. As a parent, I understand some of the struggles parents face, and as a social worker, I adhere to the principle that all of us, parents, family, friends, community members, and governments, have a role to play in ensuring children have the supports to succeed in life.

Upon assuming the position as Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, one of my first priorities was to ensure we were doing our part to meet the developmental needs of children and having measurable outcomes to assess if our programs and...

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled "Early Development Instrument: Measuring Children's Developmental Health, NWT Change Over Time 2012-2017." Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

We don't have a traditional MOU, because that is not something that we use traditionally across departments. It is more what we use with contractors outside of the government.

However, in saying that, we do work very closely across the departments. Our deputy ministers meet regularly. We have committees of Cabinet who sit and meet regularly. As well, we have our regional training partnerships that ECE uses. It has representation from ECE, Aurora College, Indigenous governments, and industry partners. We work closely, as closely as we can.

Some of the projects where we have been finding examples...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right. There is an issue about apprenticeships; in fact, it's a national issue that the numbers are going down, so we need to work on that. Since the Skills 4 Success was introduced in 2015, though, we have had 375 new apprenticeships and 188 certificates of qualification issued. One of the bigger issues that we recognize in doing that work, though, is that, one, it's getting them into it, but it's also supporting our apprenticeships to complete. So that is one of our strategies that we're looking at. In 2017, we did an Apprenticeship, Trades, and...

Again, like I had said -- sorry, we just knocked over a basket -- the Indigenous language programming is offered not only to JK; it's also to all students, so the JK students are actually able to take part in the programming that's already being offered to the kindergarten students. I do want to point out that we have two communities, Fort Providence is one of them, and Behchoko, actually, that have more of an Indigenous immersion. Within Behchoko, it's JK, junior kindergarten, to grade two, full immersion, and then Fort Providence is junior kindergarten to grade three. I think those are fine...

We do have some resources already that we use within our schools. We are always redoing our resources. The same resources that we would use for kindergarten with our Indigenous languages will be used for junior kindergarten. A lot of that is actually having elders come in and speak with them and play with them, so the development of resources isn't always having a book. That is more of a western culture. Within an Indigenous culture, it's more storytelling, having elders coming in and speaking to the children and showing them concrete examples, so we try to incorporate both western culture and...