In the face of classrooms with ever-increasing complex needs, the government is sending many Alberta schools a complexity team, which will effectively serve as a teacher’s backup.
In efforts to ease their province’s classroom complexity issues, the main point of tension during October 2025’s teachers’ strike, the Alberta Government has announced funding to establish nearly 500 complexity teams.
Each team will be made up of one teacher and two educational assistants. Each of the 476 teams will have a designated, high-complexity K-6 school.
Responsibilities will include supporting the diverse needs of students, including academic, behavioural, social, emotional, or other, according to a government-issued release. This can include helping students learn English, managing disruptive students or helping coded students with more enrichment. These teams will provide in-class assistance to teachers.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the team is the brainchild of the action team the government announced in 2025 and borrows some points from a similar initiative done in Saskatchewan.
“Our government created a 25-member action team last June. We tasked the team with identifying the cause of aggression and complexity in our classrooms and proposing recommendations for overcoming these challenges, drawing on expertise gained from many decades of frontline expert experience,” she said.
“The action team compiled a report that we released back in November, and the report confirms that in recent years, schools In Alberta have become more complex with higher levels of student needs and more pressure on our school system.”
When the report was released, Smith said that government would use the data to make informed classroom decisions, exactly what they are now doing, she said. Every child deserves a safe, supportive classroom where they can learn and every teacher deserves the backing they need to do their job well, according to Smith.
Of the total $134 million investment, $129 million will go to schools that are prioritized highest in the province for complexity factors and $14 million will go to schools with unique complexity challenges that require different or additional strategies to support students, the release reads.
Alberta’s Minister of Childcare and Education, Demetrios Nicolaides, said the funding is from Budget 2025 and is accessible immediately to school boards. Nicolaides did not comment on how the teachers and assistants will be hired, saying instead that the recruitment is up to individual school boards.
CBE to get 118 teams
One-hundred-and-seventy-one of the 476 teams will be coming to Calgary, with 118 coming to the Calgary Board of Education and 53 for the Calgary Catholic School District.
The first teams will work exclusively in K-6 schools, focusing on early Intervention and foundational stability, Nicolaides said.
“Research indicates that addressing student needs during the formative K-6 years is more effective and less costly than attempting to remediate behavioral or academic gaps in secondary school. By integrating these teams directly into elementary environments, schools can identify challenges at the earliest possible stage, preventing minor delays from becoming permanent learning barriers,” he said.
“We know classrooms will continue to evolve, and because of this, we will continue to gather data to maintain a full and accurate understanding of the challenges our schools are facing. This initial investment today is only the first part of our plan to address complexity.”
The Calgary Board of Education, in a letter sent to parents, said the additional funding is a positive step toward addressing the classroom realities today. They said that they will allocate the resources in the best interest of student learning.
“CBE will move quickly to allocate funding and resources, but additional hiring and onboarding of new employees at this point in the school year may take some time. We will keep you informed as we receive additional details,” they wrote to parents.
“It is critical that school boards can prioritize areas of greatest need. We appreciate that government will provide flexibility to request different schools for the allocation of funds, as classrooms may have changed since the data was collected.”
Jason Schilling, President of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said that the announcement is a long-awaited admission from government that education in Alberta has been chronically underfunded.
“This shift is a direct result of the relentless advocacy by teachers, bolstered by parents and communities who collectively demanded an end to the unsustainable status quo,” he said.
Despite the seemingly positive news, Schilling said teachers will need to see it to believe it.
“Government today has announced this initial step towards restoring appropriate learning conditions in Alberta, especially classrooms facing the most significant challenges. However, too often we have heard government officials say that they’ve heard the voices of teachers but failed to act,” he said.
“Therefore government needs to know that teachers and school leaders will be skeptical of today’s announcement.”
