I was listening to the radio a while ago and an ad came on from an Ontario teachers group. They talked about cuts to education and such things like that, but it didn't give a lot of specifics. Since it'd be silly of me to expect a 20-second ad to contain much context, I decided to dig into the numbers and get some context for myself for the Ontario K-12 education funding.
First, a minor disclaimer: I am not an accountant. I am not certain that I have understood all the data correctly. I tried as best as I could to get accurate numbers, but I can't be certain that how those numbers were compiled didn't change over time. Hopefully all this data is accurate. Anyway, on with things.
The first thing I had to do was find some credible numbers. This wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, because there are different ways to classify education spending. I settled for tracking what is now known as "Core Education", and used to be known as "Grants for Student Needs". It is the money spent on staff and general expenses.
So I first jotted down the overall spending for the last 26 years. It is as follows:
As you can see, overall spending has continued to increase until the 2026-2027 year, when there was a cut of about $1 billion (or about 3%). This is all well and good, but what we really need to know is what spending has been over the past years adjusted for inflation. And here it is:
Interestingly, the spending peaked last year (2025-2026) at about $31.22 billion. Overall, spending has hovered around $30 billion for some time. I was actually pretty surprised by these numbers. I was assuming that there were significant cuts under the Ford government, but for the most part, things have held steady. The last chart I did up was one that charts overall spending per student enrolled. The number of student has generally sat around 2 million, so it's not dramatically different from the last chart. One note though: I couldn't find numbers for the final two years, so I just re-used the number from the previous year.
So right now Ontario is spending around $14,020 per student. Still much more than the $11,644 spent at the start of the graph, which was near the end of the Harris years. The peak was in 2017-2018 where it was, adjusted for inflation, $15,350 per student.
So there you have it. I was actually surprised by the results. I was expecting that the Ford government had made more significant cuts, judging by the ad I heard on the radio. Anyway, hopefully you learned something from this exercise.