ADHD and Schoolwork in Canada: What Helps, and What a Tutor Can and Cannot Do

Ten questions to ask before you hire a tutor for a child with ADHD

• 1. Will you teach organisation and study skills explicitly, or only the subject content? The parts of tutoring that show up inside trials that worked are organisation, study skills, note-taking and writing, and they show up as components of much larger programmes rather than as anything tested on its own. Subject content is not one of them.
• 2. What will you do about hyperactivity and fidgeting? The honest answer is "work around it". A 2025 meta-analysis of school-based trials found no significant effect on hyperactivity at all.
• 3. How will you set up the session itself? A quiet setting, reduced noise and visual clutter, and a dedicated work space are accommodations Ontario lists by name, and a one-to-one session delivers most of them by construction.
• 4. Which accommodations from the school plan will you mirror, and how? If there is a plan, its instructional list is concrete and checkable.
• 5. Will you send the school written observations it can use? For a child not yet formally identified, Ontario says the description of strengths and needs rests partly "on the basis of observations of the student". Whether the school uses a private tutor's notes is the school's call, but a dated, specific page is easier to use than a verbal impression.
• 6. Will you report back to us and to the teacher on a fixed rhythm, and in what form? Agree it before the first session. The school-to-home daily report card, which does have meta-analysed evidence behind it, is a school mechanism, and a tutor's notes sit alongside it rather than inside it.
• 7. How will we know in eight weeks whether this is working, and who decides? In the 2025 review, on inattention specifically, teachers and parents both reported smaller improvements than the children reported in themselves, while the one outcome scored by a trained observer went the other way. Agree the measure in advance, and make sure it includes a piece of actual work as well as impressions.
• 8. Are you telling me you can diagnose, assess, or get my child a school plan? Any yes is a reason to walk away. The same goes for anyone vague about who is actually teaching: our guide to certified teachers versus other tutors covers how to check.
• 9. My child is on a board assessment wait list. Does that change what you would do? The correct answer is no, we start now, and you stay on the list. Support while you wait is not a replacement for the assessment, and it does not reduce what the school itself owes your child in the meantime. What the school owes is set province by province, so ask the school directly what it is doing while you wait.
• 10. Is my child working towards the ordinary grade-level expectations, or towards changed ones? Ontario calls the changed ones modified expectations, Alberta calls it modified programming and British Columbia a modified program, and other provinces word it differently. A tutor teaching to the grade-level target for a child who is not working towards it is teaching towards the wrong thing.

Does ADHD qualify a child for an IEP in Ontario?

Not on its own. Ontario's special education guide sets out the five categories of exceptionality named in the Education Act: behavioural, communicational, intellectual, physical and multiple. Between them they carry twelve subcategories. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder appears in none of them.

That is the fact behind a conversation thousands of Canadian parents have had. The Centre for ADHD Awareness, Canada publishes parents' own accounts of it, including this one: "The school has the report. The principal said that ADHD doesn't get an IEP!?!?!?"

The principal was wrong, and the Ministry's own documents say so twice over.

First, the Ministry states that the categories are not driven by diagnosis: "The determining factor for the provision of special education programs or services is not any specific diagnosed or undiagnosed medical condition, but rather the need of the individual student based on an individual assessment of strengths and needs." It adds that the categories are "meant to be inclusive of all medical conditions, whether diagnosed or not, that can lead to particular types of learning difficulties".

Second, a Ministry memorandum to school boards dated 19 December 2011, quoted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in an endnote to its education policy, names ADHD outright. Inclusion of conditions such as autism in the guide's definitions, it says, "is not intended to exclude any other medical condition that may result in learning difficulties, such as (but not limited to) Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD)".

And there is a second door that many parents are never told about. The Ministry's own guidance says plainly: "An IEP may be developed for a student who has not been identified by an IPRC as exceptional, but who has been deemed by the board to require a special education program or services in order to attend school or to achieve curriculum expectations and/or to demonstrate learning."

In other words, the identification meeting is one route to a plan. It is not the only route, and the other route is almost as busy. The Ministry's own count, quoted by the Human Rights Commission, is that in 2014/15, the most recent year it had published, more than 178,500 Ontario students were identified by an IPRC as exceptional, and a further 162,000 who were never formally identified were provided with special education programs and services anyway. We have written separately on what an Ontario IEP actually contains and what to give a tutor.

The strongest thing a parent can carry into that meeting is not in the Ministry documents at all. It is in the Ontario Human Rights Commission's 2018 policy on accessible education, and it is broader than anything the school framework says: the legal duty to accommodate "exists whether or not a student with a disability falls within the Ministry's definition of" an exceptional pupil, "and whether or not the student has gone through a formal IPRC process, or has an IEP".

The Commission also records the gap between that policy and daily practice. It has heard from parents and advocacy organisations "that some Ministry of Education documents fail to specifically name ADHD as an" exceptionality, "and that, as a result, some education providers are failing to provide accommodation for this condition". Its own note on the law is blunt: "human rights jurisprudence has explicitly recognized ADHD as a disability requiring accommodation under the Code."

So the policy is permissive and the practice is inconsistent, and a parent should walk in knowing both.

The Ontario Human Rights Code binds Ontario, and every other province has its own human rights code and its own commission. There is no federal statute setting out what a school board owes a student with ADHD, because education is provincial.

There is one national authority, though, and it is the single most useful thing for a parent outside Ontario to know about. In Moore v. British Columbia (Education), 2012 SCC 61, a father complained on his son's behalf after the school district closed the diagnostic centre where the boy, who had severe dyslexia, could get the intensive remediation the district's own psychologist said he needed. The Supreme Court of Canada substantially allowed the appeal. Its headnote states the principle in a sentence a parent can quote: adequate special education "is not a dispensable luxury", and for those with severe learning disabilities "it is the ramp that provides access to the statutory commitment to education made to all children in British Columbia". Prima facie discrimination was made out, the headnote says, "based on the insufficiently intensive remediation provided by the District for J's learning disability in order for him to get access to the education he was entitled to", and the District's budget-crisis justification failed because it had never assessed what alternatives were available before closing the centre.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. The case was brought under British Columbia's Human Rights Code, and it concerned a learning disability rather than ADHD, so it does not hand a parent in another province a rule about ADHD. What it settles, and what Ontario's Human Rights Commission, an intervener in the case, cites it for, is the question a school has to answer: whether the child had meaningful access to the general education every child is entitled to. Comparing a child only with other students who have special needs is the wrong test, because a board could then cut every special education programme and still be in the clear.

What the plan is called where you live

The document has a different name in almost every province, which is why searching for "IEP" from outside Ontario returns so little that fits. Checked on 14 September 2026, with the source for each row, because the name is the thing a parent has to get right before anyone at the school knows what they are being asked.

Read the table with one warning attached, because it is the thing most versions of this table get wrong. The plan a province names is not the same object everywhere. Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia put both jobs in one document: the accommodations that help a child reach the ordinary grade expectations, and any change to those expectations. Ask for an IEP or an IPP there and you have asked for the right thing either way. Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan split the two jobs across two separate tracks, so the plan a parent usually hears named, the IPP or the IIP, is the second track, and not the one most children with ADHD need. Quebec keeps both inside a single plan d'intervention but distinguishes them within it. Manitoba and New Brunswick are in the table but not in that sorting: their own published files did not let us place them with confidence, so ask the school there which of the two jobs the plan is doing. The rows name both tracks where a province runs two, and the paragraphs after the table say which track a child with ADHD usually belongs in.

One row there rests on weaker evidence than the others. New Brunswick's own policy file sits behind a block that refuses every automated request, so the name comes from a third-party report rather than from the province's own file. That report is Disability Policy in Canada Provincial and Territorial Report, published by the Kids Brain Health Network, a pan-Canadian document with a New Brunswick section rather than a New Brunswick document, and one whose cover reads January 2025 while its own suggested citation reads 2024. Wherever you live, the school office is still the fastest place to confirm what the document is called.

The two-track provinces are where a parent can most easily ask for the wrong thing, so they are worth spelling out. Nova Scotia's Department of Education and Early Childhood Development defines an adaptation as "a documented strategy or resource that accommodates the learning needs of an individual student", planned "to enable a student to achieve the public school curriculum outcomes", and adds that "formal identification of a special need or disability is not required". An Individual Program Plan is the other track, and the department's definition of it is the line that matters: it is a statement of individualised outcomes "developed for students for whom Nova Scotia's public school program learning outcomes are not applicable and/or attainable". A child with ADHD who can reach the ordinary outcomes with support is asking for documented adaptations. Asking for an IPP is asking for that child's outcomes to be changed, which is a different decision with different consequences for what they leave school with.

Saskatchewan splits it the same way. Support starts with the Adaptive Dimension, which adjusts the learning environment, instruction, assessment and resources, and within which "curricular outcomes are not changed"; an Inclusion and Intervention Plan is for students who need support beyond that. Quebec keeps both inside one plan d'intervention, and its own ministry guide draws the line inside the document: adaptations first, "to allow certain students with particular needs to develop the competencies prescribed by the Education Program", and only "in more exceptional cases" a set of realistic objectives defined in their place.

Underneath the naming there is a second split, on a different axis entirely. CADDAC's 2017 white paper on inequitable access describes the split: "Four provinces, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta, use a system of 'Identification' which allows a student with learning impairments to be officially recognized as an exceptional learner, or pupil with exceptional learning needs." The rest do not formally identify students, and instead require principals to meet their needs.

That split traces back to CADDAC's 2010 provincial report card, so read it as the shape of the system rather than this week's state of it; CADDAC itself records that three of the four have since changed or proposed changes. The four are not interchangeable either. In Ontario, where ADHD sits in none of the twelve subcategories, a co-occurring condition that does sit in one, most often a learning disability, is frequently the child's actual route to a plan. Alberta is the exception CADDAC names: it "does have a code under which students with ADHD can be identified", though CADDAC reports that the code's use appears to have declined.

What actually helps, according to the research

The fullest recent answer is a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology by Beliz Yegencik, Beth Bell and Emre Deniz of the University of York, covering school-based randomised controlled trials published between 1980 and 2024. Twenty-six trials met the inclusion criteria, twenty-two of them entered the meta-analyses, and the twenty-six together carried 2,102 participants aged 4 to 18. The authors describe it as the most comprehensive review to date, which is their claim rather than a measured fact.

School-based interventions improved academic performance (d = 0.37) and social skills (d = 0.28), and reduced combined ADHD symptoms (d = -0.28), inattention (d = -0.33) and externalising problems (d = -0.32). All of those reached significance. On symptom measures a negative figure means the symptom went down, which is the direction you want.

Hyperactivity and impulsivity did not move. The measured effect was d = -0.09 and it was not statistically significant. The authors put it plainly: school-based interventions "appeared to be ineffective in reducing hyperactivity/impulsivity".

The schoolwork half of ADHD responds to school-based intervention; the fidgeting half, on this evidence, does not. Note what that does and does not license. The review tested school-based interventions, never a tutor, so it cannot tell you a tutor will fail on hyperactivity. What it can tell you is that no support for a calmer child exists in the best current synthesis of this literature, and a tutor promising one is promising something the evidence base does not contain.

The same review has something to say about timing. The interventions worked better in primary school than in secondary school for combined ADHD symptoms, for inattention and for academic skills, which cuts against the instinct to wait until the work gets harder. For social skills and externalising problems, school type made no difference. That matters for the two middle-school trials described further down, which both sit in the age band where this review found school-based work less effective.

It also matters who is doing the judging. On inattention, teachers and parents both reported significantly smaller improvements than the children reported in themselves. The one inattention outcome scored by a trained observer rather than by someone close to the child ran the other way, reporting significantly larger gains than the children did, and the authors flag that it rests on a single observer-rated outcome and is underpowered on its own. Outside inattention the raters mostly agree: for combined ADHD symptoms, academic skills, social skills and externalising problems, who was doing the rating made no significant difference to the result. Hyperactivity is the other exception, and it is the same exception. There too a single observer-rated outcome reported significantly larger gains than the children did, while parents and teachers did not differ from them.

The authors also publish their own limitations rather than burying them. They found evidence of possible publication bias for the ADHD and inattention results, and describe their findings as suffering from "high heterogeneity and some level of potential reporter-bias".

The field genuinely disagrees with itself, too. As the 2025 authors summarise it, the earliest meta-analyses found school interventions somewhat beneficial, while "later evidence with control conditions found no significant effects of such interventions".

Does paid one-to-one tutoring have evidence behind it?

No, and this is the part a tutoring company has every incentive not to tell you. The scope of that answer matters, because "tutoring" names two different things.

One of them does have a small literature. Classroom peer tutoring, where children in the same class work through material in pairs, was tested for ADHD by DuPaul, Ervin, Hook and McGoey, who contrasted ordinary instruction with classwide peer tutoring for eighteen children with ADHD in first- to fifth-grade general education classes and published the result in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 1998. They found more active engagement in academic tasks and less off-task behaviour for most participants, with half the children with ADHD improving in math or spelling. Ontario's own accommodation list puts "Buddy/peer tutoring" first among its instructional accommodations. What has no evidence base is the other thing, and it is the thing families actually buy: a paid adult working one-to-one with one child, usually outside school hours.

The word "tutor" appears zero times in the article text of that 2025 review, references and author affiliations included. Read that for what it is worth rather than more. The review's search strings were "adhd" AND "school" AND "intervention", with synonyms for each, and a trial had to deliver its intervention in a school setting to be included at all, so a private tutor was outside the frame before the screening started. The absence marks where the review drew its boundary and nothing more. The review counts the twenty-six trials it did include across nine intervention types, some of them running more than one, and prints the count for each: multimodal programmes (eleven trials), cognitive training (six), neurofeedback (four), self-monitoring (two), study and organisational skills (two), the daily report card (two), relaxation training (one), social skills training (one) and task modification (one). Paid one-to-one academic tutoring is not one of the nine.

The honest claim is one step removed. The ingredients a good tutor delivers do appear inside trials that worked. One programme included in the review is described as "direct instruction in organisation, study skills, note-taking, and writing, with in-program practice and real-life application".

That programme deserves a closer look, because the trial it came from carries a second result, and it is the one a tutoring company would least like to quote. The trial is Evans and colleagues, 2016, in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and it ran three arms rather than two. Three hundred and twenty-six students in grades six to eight were assigned to the Challenging Horizons after-school programme, which the review clocks at about 121 hours; to a mentoring version, in which a trained adult, usually a teacher, delivered a subset of the same interventions one-to-one during the school day, which the review clocks at about five and a half hours; or to community care, meaning no direct intervention at all. The after-school programme produced the gains. In the authors' own words, it "leads to significant benefits for adolescents with ADHD compared with the services provided in" both the mentoring arm and community care.

That one-to-one mentoring arm is the closest thing in this entire evidence base to what a paid tutor does, and it is the arm that did not produce the result. It is not a clean verdict on tutoring. Five and a half hours against a hundred and twenty-one is a dose gap wide enough to explain a great deal by itself, a school mentor is not a tutor a family hires and briefs, and one trial is one trial. But anyone quoting this study to sell you organisation coaching should have to say which of its three arms they are quoting.

So the ingredients show up inside packages that worked, in those packages' large-dose form. Nobody has isolated them. The review ran no component-level analysis, so nothing in it tells you which part of that programme did the work, and nothing in it tests those parts delivered by a paid tutor.

The closest thing to a test of the content a tutor would deliver is a 2012 randomised trial by Joshua Langberg, Jeffery Epstein and Stephen Becker in School Psychology Review. Seventeen school mental health providers across five school districts delivered the Homework, Organization, and Planning Skills programme to middle school students with ADHD in grades 6 to 8, and forty-seven students were randomised to the programme or to a waitlist. On parent ratings of organisation, planning and homework completion the programme group improved significantly, with large effect sizes. On teacher ratings, participants "did not make significant improvements relative to the comparison group". Read the design before you read the result. School mental health staff delivered the programme; no outside tutor was involved. And a waitlist comparison tells you the programme beats nothing, which is a long way from telling you it beats an ordinary tutor.

The daily report card, a short structured note passing between school and home, has been meta-analysed more than once. The 2017 analysis by Kellina Pyle and Gregory Fabiano in Exceptional Children pooled fourteen articles covering forty single-subject cases and found improvement with the card's use, and it names an earlier meta-analysis by Vannest and colleagues in 2010. These are single-case studies rather than randomised trials, which changes what they can show. Pyle and Fabiano chose that literature deliberately: single-case designs are where the daily report card has been tested on its own rather than inside a package, and they make up a large share of the ADHD psychosocial treatment literature. They also note that such designs often produce large effect sizes, and argue on that basis that single-case work "should be subjected to the same scrutiny as between-group designs".

For a parent hiring a tutor, two details in that paper matter more than the headline. The card runs between the teacher and the home, and the word tutor appears nowhere in it. And the level of communication between home and school "did not moderate outcomes". That result cuts against the prior meta-analysis, which had found the highest home-school communication producing significantly stronger effects, and the authors are careful about it: they write that it "was not anticipated and deserves a more thorough investigation", note that their small number of studies limits what can be concluded about study-level moderators in particular, and call for future work on which type and degree of communication actually influences outcomes. Read it as a reason not to assume that more reporting is automatically more effect, rather than as proof that reporting does not matter.

What a tutor can copy from a school plan

Ontario defines an accommodation as a change to how a child learns, never to what they are expected to learn. The provision of accommodations, the Ministry says, "in no way alters the curriculum expectations for the grade level or course".

There are three kinds: instructional, environmental and assessment. The Ministry's instructional list reads like a tutoring session plan, and its first entry is the one a tutoring article is most tempted to skip past: buddy/peer tutoring, then note-taking assistance, scaffolding learning, a highly structured approach, graphic organisers, organisational coaching, time-management aids, more frequent breaks, extra time for processing, repetition of information, rewording of information, tracking sheets and a reduced, uncluttered format. Breaking work into pieces over time sits on the assessment list rather than the instructional one, as "chunking of assessment tasks over time", and the distinction is worth keeping straight: assessment accommodations govern how a child is allowed to show what they know.

The environmental list is where a one-to-one session has an advantage a classroom of thirty cannot offer: an alternative work space, strategic seating, proximity to the instructor, reduction of audio and visual stimuli, minimising background noise, and a quiet setting. A one-to-one online session delivers most of that by default rather than by effort.

A modification is a different thing, and blurring the two causes real damage. Modifications are "changes made in the grade-level expectations for a subject or course". Only the school can make them. A tutor who does not know whether a child is on modified expectations does not know what they are teaching towards.

That vocabulary and those lists are Ontario's. Every province draws the same line between changing how a child learns and changing what they are expected to learn, but several draw it in different words and, as the table above shows, in different documents. If you are outside Ontario, the distinction still holds. Ask the school which side of it your child is on, and what the province calls each side.

What a tutor cannot do

Four things, and none of them is negotiable.

A tutor cannot diagnose. A tutor is not a regulated health professional, and separating ADHD from a learning disability is clinical work rather than teaching work.

A tutor cannot carry out or replace a psychoeducational assessment. Ontario requires the picture of a not-yet-identified child to rest on "appropriate educational, health, and/or psychological assessments, and on the basis of observations of the student", and the assessments in that sentence are the work of regulated professionals.

A tutor cannot write, amend or enforce a school plan. In Ontario, under Regulation 181/98, an IEP must be developed within thirty school days of an exceptional student's placement in a special education program, and the Ministry applies the same thirty-day period to students who have not been identified by an IPRC but who receive a special education program or services. The authors are the student's school-based team. Nothing in the framework admits an outside private provider, and both the clock and the wording are Ontario's own; every province runs its own timetable.

A tutor cannot advise on medication, and cannot deliver the school's own special education services.

If you are weighing the options, we have compared the tutoring routes available to families in Canada elsewhere. What a tutor can legitimately do is narrower and still useful: deliver those accommodations in session, teach organisation and study skills explicitly, give the school written observations it can use, and keep the child moving while the family waits.

The wait nobody mentions

The wait is the constraint most families actually hit, and the best-documented version of it is Ontario's.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission cites Ontario's 2017 Auditor General report, which audited four school boards. Its footnote reproduces what the Auditor General actually found: "For three of the four boards, 24% or more of the students on the psychological services wait lists had been waiting for more than a year. Some students had been on the wait lists for more than two years." The Commission's own sentence in the body of its report paraphrases that more loosely, as nearly one quarter of students with special education needs in the four boards waiting more than a year. Use the footnote. The quarter is a share of the children already on a psychology wait list rather than of every child with special education needs, and it held in three of the four boards rather than in all four. The same Commission report cites People for Education, which surveys principals across Ontario and, in its 2018 report, found from 1,244 principals that 93 per cent of elementary schools and 79 per cent of secondary schools had students on wait lists. Some schools reported being allowed to refer only two students a year. Those are Ontario figures, and no comparable national count exists.

CADDAC puts the assessment requirement itself in the dock. Many school boards, its 2017 white paper says, "require neuropsychological or psycho-educational testing to determine the severity of ADHD and to quantify the impact of ADHD on cognitive or academic functioning. This is not a reasonable or valid requirement since few if any of the standardized tests quantify accurately the nature of the cognitive or academic impairments of ADHD." Its summary is blunter still: imposing that requirement before a student with ADHD is treated as disabled is "unreasonable, invalid and discriminatory". Schools, it adds, cite the need for that testing and wait lists of two or more years "as a reason to delay and bar students from being identified as exceptional learners".

The Commission's Right to Read inquiry records how boards triage when they cannot assess everyone. One educator, quoted directly: "Students with the highest behavioural needs are placed first. Students with reading challenges are recommended to seek private assessments as the wait is indefinite." Read as the parent of a child with ADHD, that sentence cuts two ways. A child whose ADHD shows up as disruption may be seen sooner. A child whose ADHD shows up as quiet inattention has nothing in it working for them. The Commission's own summary of the outcome is that "parents who can afford to pay get private assessments", and it calls the result a two-tiered system inside a public education system that should be equitable for all.

Private assessment is not cheap, and there is no government-published national figure to quote. As one dated data point rather than a range: an Ontario assessment clinic advertises a comprehensive private psychoeducational assessment, including intake, testing, scoring, a written report and feedback, at $4,000, with a turnaround of around three weeks. That is one clinic's published price on 14 September 2026, not the cost in Ontario. Prices vary, and a school board assessment carries no direct fee to the family at all.

The Commission is also clear about what should happen while a family waits. The passage sits inside its reading inquiry and concerns a child who is not responding to evidence-based reading intervention, which is narrower ground than ADHD. What it says about the school's obligation still travels: "schools should not wait for the results of a psychoeducational assessment before providing more intensive intervention." Students waiting for assessment, it adds, "should always receive more intensive intervention immediately, regardless of when the assessment is completed."

That is the Ontario Human Rights Commission stating what it believes Ontario schools owe a student, inside a policy document about reading. It is not a rule in force across Canada. In Ontario it is a position a parent can quote back to a principal; elsewhere it is an argument rather than an authority. What it is not, anywhere, is a reason to buy something. The practical version for a family is narrow. Ask the school what it is doing now. Keep the referral in place. Treat anything you arrange privately as running alongside the wait rather than instead of it.

ADHD and learning disabilities are not the same thing

They are formally different, and ADHD is not classified as a learning disability in Canada. They also travel together often. A 2021 study by Crisci and colleagues in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, setting up its own work on executive function in 97 children, cites DuPaul and colleagues for a comorbidity rate between specific learning disorder and ADHD of 31 to 45 per cent, and Sadek for an overlap between reading-related difficulties and ADHD of 25 to 48 per cent. Those are ranges carried in from other work rather than findings of that study, and the same passage notes the figure moves with the academic domain: for maths-related difficulties it gives 11 to 30 per cent. Use the range rather than a headline number.

The two get tangled for a reason visible in Ontario's own definition of a learning disability, which names executive function, the domain ADHD sits in, among the cognitive processes involved.

One number in this area has no settled explanation, and the Public Health Agency of Canada says so itself. Between 2019 and 2023, diagnosed ADHD among Canadian children aged 1 to 17 rose from 6.7 per cent to 8.4 per cent. Over the same four years, in the same survey and the same population, diagnosed learning disabilities fell from 8.4 per cent to 6.8 per cent. Those figures come from the Public Health Agency of Canada's reporting on the Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth. ADHD is now the most commonly diagnosed long-term condition in that dataset, reported at 10.8 per cent of boys against 5.9 per cent of girls, and it is higher in Quebec and lower in Ontario.

The Agency raises the drop in its own discussion and says it "may deserve further investigation", pointing at two datasets that run the other way: longer time trends in the United States that were found to be stable, and Canadian data for people aged 15 and older between 2017 and 2022 that showed an increase. So the people who publish the number do not have an explanation for it either. Whether it reflects a real shift, a change in how children are being assessed, or both, cannot be told from this data. Treat it as a reason to be careful with any single prevalence figure, including this one.

One thing to do at the kitchen table this week

Pick one piece of homework that went badly. Sit down with your child, with no timer and nobody else watching, and ask them to talk you through what happened, minute by minute, from opening the bag to giving up.

You are listening for where it broke. Our guide to free homework help across Canada covers what is available while you work that out. Not knowing the material is one problem, and math anxiety is a different one again. Not knowing where to start, losing the sheet, reading the question three times without it landing, or doing forty minutes of work and never handing it in are four completely different problems, and only one of them is fixed by more teaching of the subject.

Write down what you hear, with the date. That single page is the most useful thing you can take into a meeting with a teacher, and it is the kind of observation Ontario's own guide says a school draws on when it describes a child's strengths and needs.