Differentiated instruction, student-centred pacing, and inclusive classroom strategies are frequently celebrated as hallmarks of modern pedagogy. In their 2022 article for Academic Matters, UBC faculty Siobhán McPhee and Michael Jerowsky describe flexible teaching models as a way to support “students’ transitions into the world of work” by encouraging them to “critically integrate and construct new knowledge for themselves” while engaging deeply with course content.
When supported by adequate time and planning, this vision offers educators the opportunity to meet diverse student needs through adaptive techniques and inclusive structures. As McPhee and Jerowsky report from a UBC classroom survey, students found this flexibility motivating: “Overwhelmingly, a balance of real-time (synchronous) and self-paced (asynchronous) delivery helped reinforce course learning objectives” and supported collaboration using tools like Microsoft Teams and Tapestry (What is ‘blended learning’ and how can it benefit post-secondary students?).
The research case for mixed-grade innovation
Research in K–12 settings echoes similar findings. In Blended Learning as an Instructional Strategy to Improve Academic Performance, researchers noted “statistically significant differences in academic performance” between students in flexible and traditional environments, suggesting that multimodal, differentiated approaches enhance engagement and achievement.
These studies emphasise the potential of adaptive instruction to deepen learning, foster autonomy, and support a wider range of learners—provided the right supports are in place.
How austerity reframes educational intent
But pedagogical promise, as with all social policy, cannot be evaluated in isolation from its implementation context. And in British Columbia’s post-pandemic public education system, pedagogical flexibility has become a casualty of austerity. Multi-grade or split-grade classes, long used in rural contexts, are now increasingly deployed in urban schools not as an instructional choice but as a cost-saving mechanism. Post-COVID rise of blended classrooms in BC elementary schools
Structural incentives and systemic workaround
In elementary schools across British Columbia, split-grade classrooms—in which students from two or more grade levels are taught together—have proliferated since the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Ministry and school board documentation, this shift is largely driven by “budget pressures and cost-saving measures,” compounded by contract rules that require schools to stay within caps for both class size and the number of students with special needs.
The BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) collective agreement, restored in 2017 following a Supreme Court ruling, enforces class size and composition limits—for instance, no more than three students with an IEP in a single room. Rather than exceeding these limits and triggering contractual remedies (such as additional EA time or prep), districts often choose to redistribute students across multi-grade classrooms. Districts often split up neurodivergent students to avoid exceeding thresholds—even when those students are friends, co-regulators, or mutually supportive peers.
This isn’t pedagogy by design. It’s pedagogy by constraint.
Why differentiation fails under scarcity
Educational researchers have long recognised the promise of differentiated instruction in theory. But the idealised vision of adaptive teaching quickly breaks down when class configurations are driven by fiscal scarcity rather than student needs. In a 2022 study titled Teachers’ Experiences of a Professional Development Program for Differentiated Instruction, teachers reported that implementing these strategies required more planning time and smaller, more manageable class sizes. As one participant noted, they struggled to tailor instruction effectively because the class groupings included a wide range of learners and the supports needed for differentiation were not consistently available.
Similar tensions appear in Blended Learning for Diverse Classrooms: Qualitative Experimental Study With In-Service Teachers, where teachers acknowledged improved student participation in some cases, while also expressing that meaningful implementation required significantly more planning time and structural support than was typically available.
In BC’s multi-grade classrooms, these planning needs are rarely met. One teacher may be expected to simultaneously cover two different provincial curricula, accommodate multiple behavioural profiles, and differentiate for diverse learning needs—all without guaranteed EA support. In this context, differentiation is less an instructional strategy than an impossible burden. The very conditions required to enact pedagogical innovation are those most frequently absent.
Displacement as pedagogy: separating children to balance books
Families of disabled and neurodivergent children often describe the emotional dislocations caused by split-grade classrooms as more painful than any formal exclusion. Students are routinely separated from trusted peers to meet composition limits, placed with younger grades to avoid staffing obligations, or reassigned to unfamiliar teachers mid-year. For children with complex regulation needs or trauma histories, these changes can be destabilising and deeply distressing.
Yet these harms are frequently reframed by schools as growth opportunities. A child placed in a 5/6/7 split without any friends was assured it would “build resilience.” These narratives obscure the truth: many of these decisions were made for budgetary reasons, not educational ones.
Institutional austerity is moralised as character-building—with children asked to interpret emotional injury as opportunity.
The invisible budget: harm absorbed into children’s bodies
If British Columbia intends to retain or expand multi-grade classroom models, a more transparent and critical lens is urgently required. When implemented with sufficient resources, planning time, and professional autonomy, split-grade classrooms can foster student agency, peer learning, and innovation. But in today’s underfunded system, they are too often a mask for structural failure.
As McPhee and Jerowsky write in What is ‘blended learning’ and how can it benefit post-secondary students?, “a blended approach to teaching and learning does not mean less teaching because now technology does it. Rather, educational technology can help foster better learning environments, and more engaged and flexible ways of teaching.” That principle holds only when educators are given the conditions to teach, rather than merely to contain.
The costs of austerity do not disappear; they are displaced—into the nervous systems of children, the burnout of educators, and the growing mistrust between families and public institutions. Every split class formed to avoid hiring another teacher, every remedy dodged through administrative reorganisation, every peer bond broken to satisfy composition rules—these are ledger entries in a hidden budget of harm.
A final accounting: the conditions for true pedagogical integrity
To restore integrity to student-centred education, BC must restore the relational, pedagogical, and structural conditions that allow it to thrive. Otherwise, we are left with an illusion of innovation—one that treats children as line items, and education as an exercise in creative arithmetic.
It’s time to act to fund BC public education
The countdown to September has begun. Parents are tired of paying for the government’s failure to act. This year, families won’t settle for silence or delay.
To the Government of BC, your invoice is due!