Education FACTS!

November 7, 2022

Our government is spending more on education than any other government in Ontario’s history.
Spending on education in Ontario has increased by 9 per cent or nearly $3 billion – from $29.49 billion in 2017-18 to $32.23 billion in 2021-22.
80 per cent of spending on public education in Ontario goes to salaries and compensation.

In the 2020-21 school year, there were 130,923 teachers, which is an increase of nearly 5,000 teachers from the 2017-18 school year.
In the 2020-21 school year, there were 10,072 early childhood educators, an increase of over 1,000 early childhood educators from the 2017-2018 school year.
As a result, the student-teacher ratio has dropped from 16.0 to 15.5.
CUPE has cited the average salary of education workers as $39,000. This figure is not accurate as it includes wages of employees that work part-time over 194 days a year.
In fact, education workers in Ontario are paid the highest in Canada with an average hourly wage of $27.00, which comes with job security and a defined benefits pension plan that most Canadians don’t have access to.
CUPE demanded an 11.7 per cent hourly annual raise. When combined with all other benefits, their demands equaled a nearly 50 per cent increase in compensation.
We put forward an offer that provides the largest wage increase for education workers in over a decade and protects the most generous benefits and pension plan in the country, including 131 paid sick days per year (11 days at 100 per cent and 120 short-term disability at 90 per cent).
Our offer of 2.5 per cent for lowest paid and 1.5 per cent for highest paid is on par with most collective agreements reached this year according to the data collected by Statistics Canada. So far this year, the national average wage settlement is 1.8 per cent.
We have offered education workers the most generous offer any government has made in over a decade. In comparison, between 2012 and 2015, the previous Liberal government gave education workers no increase at all.