In March 2007, the Queen’s University IRC received a $1 million grant from the Ontario Ministry of Education to conduct research aimed to better understand labour relations in Ontario’s K-12 schools.

In bestowing the grant, then-Deputy Minister Ben Levin recognized the IRC for contributions relating to its “cutting edge programs for practitioners in industrial relations.” These contributions, Deputy Minister Levin wrote, are demonstrated by the IRC’s “undertaking research on best practices in promoting collaborative working relationships” in education; its valuable training based on that research; and its delivery of programs to school board and union leaders.

“The grant is an exciting development, one that will further advance our research — and enable us to enrich our practitioner programs with the results,” says Queen’s IRC Director Paul Juniper.
Under the grant, the IRC is pursuing a number of projects with the goal of identifying best practices in labour relations practices and improving the labour environment in Ontario’s K-12 school system. Research conducted under the grant focuses on:

• Inter-provincial comparison of education sector collective bargaining in Canada
• Provincial discussion table bargaining and its impacts on labour relations
• The role of principals and vice-principals as they related to labour relations in K-12 schools
• The impact of teacher shortages and surpluses on labour relations and the education sector in general
• The contemporary role of educational support workers in Ontario’s K-12 schools

Numerous interviews, focus groups, and consultations with a wide variety of education sector stakeholders, as well as province-wide surveys of principals and vice-principals, human resources managers and superintendents, teachers’ union representatives, and support workers’ union representatives have been conducted. The information collected through these processes will help inform a variety of practitioner and academic publications and the development of customized training for education sector stakeholders. An initial report on findings is available on the IRC website (http://irc.queensu.ca/news/a-report-on-the-ircs-major-research-initiative), and recent pilot programming for principals and school board-level human resource practitioners and union representatives have been overwhelmingly successful.

For more information, or to learn how you can participate in this project, please contact Dr. Brendan Sweeney at sweeneyb@queensu.ca.