Development of Official-Language Communities Program
Minority-Language Education component
The Minority-Language Education component of the Development of Official-Language Communities Program aims to improve the provincial and territorial supply of programs and activities to provide education in the language of official-language minority communities (Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones outside Quebec), at all levels of education, and also to increase the production and dissemination of knowledge and innovative methods and tools to support teaching in the language of the minority .
The objectives of Minority-Language Education are :
to help provincial and territorial governments, directly or through the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, (CMEC) provide members of official-language minority communities (Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones outside Quebec) with education in their own language, which means:
to prepare students eligible for minority-language education (preschool, francization, etc.);
to attract and retain a larger percentage of eligible students for minority-language education;
to foster the integration of eligible students with inadequate linguistic skills into the minority school;
within provincial and territorial legislation, to foster the integration of new arrivals whose first official language is that of the linguistic minority into the minority school system;
to support minority-language teaching through up-to-date educational programs and activities in primary and secondary schools;
to implement and consolidate Francophone school management in minority communities;
to support post-secondary education in the minority language, including distance education and the development of a virtual post-secondary education network;
to facilitate access to post-secondary education;
to help increase the number of teachers in the minority system and contribute to their development;
to enable more Canadians at the post-secondary level to become full-time or part-time monitors of French as a first language in the minority system or at post-secondary institutions;
to enable more Canadians to improve their first language skills;
to contribute to the research and dissemination of knowledge, methods and tools related to minority-language education.
This component of the program enables the Government of Canada to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of a provincial or territorial minority-language education system, to support first-language skill development activities and to finance projects aimed at producing and disseminating knowledge, methods and tools for the advancement of minority-language education. Two sub-components are proposed to achieve this goal: Intergovernmental Cooperation and Cooperation with the Non-Governmental Sector.
Intergovernmental Cooperation aims to help provincial and territorial governments, directly or through the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), provide members of official-language minority communities (Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones outside Quebec ) with access to education in their own language, as well as learning and development bursaries. This is achieved through three types of support:
Support for the Maintenance and Improvement of Minority-Language Education Systems;
Support for the Implementation of the Government of Canada's Action Plan for Official Languages; and
Stakeholders and projects that receive Department funding must contribute to achieving one or more of the objectives of the Minority-Language Education component of the Development of Official-Language Communities Program, as well as immediate outcomes targeted by this component.
The immediate outcomes targeted by the Minority-Language Education component are as follows:
maintenance and improvement in the provincial and territorial supply of programs and activities to provide education in the language of the official-language minority communities, at all levels of education;
increase and dissemination of knowledge and improved access to innovative methods and tools related to minority-language education;
increase in the proportion of Canadians in minority situations who study in their first official language.
