September 25, 2026
What Ontario required its school board trustees to learn in 2025, what it left out, and why all of it should be required
Summary
In 2025, using a power added to the Education Act in 2023, Ontario made governance training mandatory for school board trustees and directors of education. This note compares what the province required with the full training program available to trustees, and with the duties the Education Act places on boards.
- The required program, Essential Governance 2025, consisted of six of the 21 modules in the sector’s trustee professional development program, plus four webinars: about two hours of reading and just under six hours of recorded sessions, with credit claimed by ticking “I Agree” on a form and no test. The modules that explain how a board governs were left optional: roles and responsibilities, the board as policymaker, and multi-year strategic planning. The roles module was updated in March 2025 to reflect the same legislation as the required program, and still was not required.
- The training materials are unclear on the basic instruments of governance. The only written definitions of a policy and a procedure sit in an optional module last updated in 2019. No module, required or optional, defines a plan, and the multi-year plan is described as “a visioning and policy document”. One webinar explains the split between board policy and staff instruments more clearly than any required module, but in different terms from the written material, and another set trustee roles aside as “a whole session”. This is likely part of the explanation for the confusion between policies, procedures and plans that School Board Research finds in board documents.
- The training does not explain the trustee’s role in discharging the Education Act’s specific requirements. None of the 21 module pages, and none of the four webinars, covers the bullying prevention and intervention plan, the multi-year accessibility plan, the special education plan, or the Ministry memoranda on codes of conduct, bullying and student mental health.
- Much of the optional material is old, and none of its video is captioned: the 19 module videos were produced between 2011 and 2018. There is no evident reason for any of the program to be optional. It already exists, is openly available online and already has a completion-tracking mechanism, and the Education Act lets the Minister set the content, timing and frequency of required training. Trustees elected on 26 October 2026 take office from 15 November; whether their required training will cover roles, policymaking, planning and statutory duties has not been announced.
This note is based on the public module pages, the video host’s records and the webinars’ automatically generated captions. The module videos themselves could not be reviewed as text, and the note assesses no trustee, presenter or board. Section 8 sets out the method and its limits.
1. Introduction
Under the Education Act the board, not its staff, is responsible for developing policies, adopting a multi-year plan and monitoring whether both work (s. 169.1). The director of education is responsible for carrying them out “within policies established by the board” (s. 283(2)). Most of the confusion School Board Research encounters in board documents comes from this division: staff procedures that carry rules the board never adopted, policies that are really lists of staff steps, and required plans that are templates or menus rather than commitments. We set out the distinctions in companion guides for parents and for trustees and boards.
Those guides raised a further question. If the difference between a policy, a procedure and a plan is central to how boards are meant to work, and central to how the province assesses them, is it part of the training the province requires trustees to complete? And does that training explain what trustees must do to meet the Education Act’s requirements? This note answers both questions from public sources. The answer to both is no.
2. What the province required
Bill 98, the Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, 2023, added a new power to the Education Act. The Minister may now “establish policies and guidelines setting out training, including the content, timing and frequency of training, to be completed by board members, directors of education, supervisory officers and superintendents and require those individuals to comply” (s. 8(1), para. 3.4.1). Where training is required by a policy or guideline under that paragraph, boards must keep completion records for at least four years (s. 8(2)).
In 2025 the Ministry made training mandatory. Its 2024-25 annual report lists, among the year’s achievements in accountability and governance, “entering into an agreement with Ontario Education Services Corporation (OESC) to develop mandatory professional training for trustees and directors of education to be offered in the 2025–26 fiscal year” (Ontario Ministry of Education 2025a). The result was Essential Governance 2025, which OESC describes as “a Ministry of Education-mandated professional development training program designed by OESC for Ontario school board trustees and directors of education” that “supports sector implementation of the recent regulatory amendments set out in Bill 98” (OESC 2025a).
The program had two parts. The first was six self-directed online modules, drawn from the 21-module Good Governance for School Boards program that OESC hosts with the four trustee associations. The second was four webinars, held live in May 2025 and then posted as recordings: community engagement, mediation and conflict resolution, financial management and governance, and director of education performance appraisal, the last for trustees only at the Ministry’s request. Completion was due by 31 August 2025 and, in OESC’s words, “will be tracked and reported to the ministry by OESC.”
Table 1 sets the required modules against the full program.
Table 1. The 21 trustee professional development modules, by whether they were required in 2025
Source: OESC, Good Governance for School Boards, module pages and Essential Governance 2025 page, read 24 September 2026; video details from each module page and the video host, read 24 and 25 September 2026. “Last updated” is the date each module page displays. “Developed” is the year the module page gives for its videos; “uploaded” is the upload date recorded by the video host where the page gives none.
Ten modules were updated in March 2025. Six of them became the required program. The other four, including Roles and Responsibilities, were updated at the same time and left optional. Fifteen of the 21 modules were not required.
There is a reasonable account of the choice. The six required modules correspond to areas changed by Bill 98 and the regulations that followed it, including the trustee code of conduct regulation (O. Reg. 312/24) and the director of education performance appraisal regulation (O. Reg. 83/24). Implementing those changes is OESC’s stated purpose for the program. But Module 3 was also updated to reflect Bill 98, and an understanding of roles and of the board’s policy function underpins each of the six. The implementation rationale explains what was included. It does not explain why the roles module was left out.
What the training consisted of
The written modules are short. Each required module is a single web page of text, between about 3,700 and 5,500 words; the six together come to roughly 28,700 words, or about two hours of reading at an average adult pace. None of the six required module pages contains a video. There is no test. A trustee receives credit by entering an email address, the module number and title, ticking “I Agree” and submitting a form.
The webinars are longer and do more. The four recordings run from 81 to 99 minutes each, just under six hours in total, and OESC says viewing them on its website “will count toward meeting the Ministry of Education’s program completion requirements.” OESC describes them as sessions that “build on the learning provided in the Essential Governance modules”. Our review of their captions bears that out, with the limits set out in section 3.
- Community engagement (89 minutes, presented by a board governance consultant) is built on Module 9, but goes further than any required module on how a board governs. The presenter separates the board’s “governance policies”, which state expectations, from the “administrative policies” or “operational policies” staff develop to carry them out, and stresses that trustees must monitor whether their policies are followed.
- Mediation and conflict resolution (81 minutes, presented by an education lawyer) is largely a walk-through of the trustee code of conduct and the new integrity commissioner process, following Module 17 and the sector’s template code.
- Financial management and governance (99 minutes, presented by two associate directors of corporate services) draws on Modules 13 and 19 and on Modules 1 and 2, which were not required. It sets out the board’s strategic governance role, beginning with “setting policy and strategic direction”, and ties the budget to the multi-year plan. The presenters said the session focused on changes from the earlier versions of the modules, and that one area was “already in the module” but warranted review.
- Director of education performance appraisal (88 minutes, for trustees only) follows Module 5 and the 2024 appraisal regulation (O. Reg. 83/24), with two current and former trustees and OESC’s then executive director.
In short, the webinars added practical experience and, in the engagement session, a useful account of the board’s policy role. They did not add the missing subjects. None of the four covers the plans a board must keep, other than the multi-year plan, or how a board meets the Education Act’s policy and plan requirements.
How old the rest of the material is
Ten of the fifteen modules that were not required were last updated between 2017 and 2019 (Table 1). The 19 videos in the optional modules were produced between 2011 and 2018: between eight and fifteen years ago. They include about 94 minutes on multi-year strategic planning (Module 6) and about 42 minutes on the legal aspects of governance (Module 11), whose videos were developed in 2011.
None of the module videos is captioned. Not one of the 19 has a caption track, so a trustee who is deaf or hard of hearing, or who needs to read rather than listen, has no captions or transcript to rely on. The four 2025 webinars carry only captions generated automatically by the video host, labelled “English (auto-generated)”. We found them good enough to follow, but not accurate throughout; section references, names and figures are sometimes garbled. WCAG 2.0, the version of the web accessibility standard adopted by Ontario’s accessibility regulation (O. Reg. 191/11, s. 14), requires captions for prerecorded video. We have not determined whether that section applies to OESC’s website, and the section applies only to web content published after 1 January 2012. The videos are in the optional modules. If the whole program were required, as we argue in section 6 it should be, they would become required training for every trustee, and they would need captions.
3. What was left out, and what the materials leave unclear
Three subjects are missing from the required program: who does what, how the board makes policy, and how it plans.
The first is covered by Module 3, Roles and Responsibilities. Its update note says the module “has been updated to reflect the sector’s implementation of the recent regulatory amendments that were part of The Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act”, the same legislation the required program was built to implement. The module sets out, separately, the roles of the board, individual trustees, the chair and the director. It reminds trustees that “The Education Act distinguishes between a board’s responsibility for policy development and the responsibility of the director of education for operationalizing policies”, and that “It is important that the board of trustees be clear about roles and responsibilities and determine, through policy, which matters are operational and therefore addressed by the director, and which matters are policy and, therefore, decided on by the board.” It was not required.
The second is covered by Module 7, the board’s role as policymaker, last updated in September 2019. Module 7 is the only place in the program that defines the two instruments: “A policy is a principle or rule that guides decisions that will achieve the organization’s goals”, and “A procedure, or a protocol, is usually administrative, and provides the details of how policies are to be implemented.” It adds that “Procedures are the responsibility of directors and staff, not trustees.” It is candid about why that matters: unclear roles, it says, have produced “an excessive number of policy statements about matters which are, in fact, administrative procedures.” It was not required and has not been updated since the 2023 amendments.
The third is Module 6, on the strategic role and multi-year strategic planning, last updated in 2017. The multi-year plan is the one plan the Education Act requires every board to develop, publish, report on to parents and review each year (ss. 169.1, 169.2). The parent reporting and publication rules came into force in June 2023. The module that explains the plan predates them, its videos have no captions, and it was not required.
The required modules touch on these subjects only in passing and in service of their own topics. Module 8, on conflict, tells trustees that “The board is responsible for strategic oversight (determining the “what”) while the director is accountable for operational implementation (the “how”).” Module 5 notes that the director implements the multi-year plan and operationalizes the board’s policies. Module 9 covers the parent consultation around the multi-year plan. None of the six defines a policy, a procedure or a plan. Module 9 even sends trustees to the missing material: Module 7, it says, “identifies the board of trustees’ role in articulating policy on parent and community relations as a central governance responsibility of trustees”, and “For more information about the MYSP process, please refer to Module 6”. Neither was required.
The materials are unclear even where they exist
A trustee who completed every module, required and optional, would still not have a clear account of the three instruments.
- Two of the three are defined, in one optional module, last revised in 2019. The definitions do not appear in the required modules or in the updated roles module.
- The third is not defined at all. No module, required or optional, explains what distinguishes a plan from a policy or a procedure.
- Where the plan is described, it is described as a policy. Module 3, like the sector’s Good Governance guide, calls the multi-year plan “a visioning and policy document that sets the direction for the board” (OPSBA and OESC 2022, 39). The Education Act treats it as a plan: a document for three or more school years that must include measures allocating resources to outcomes (s. 169.1(2), (3)).
- The required modules rely on shorthand. “What” and “how” is a useful slogan, but it does not tell a trustee which document the board must adopt, which the director issues, and which commits resources to results.
What the webinars add, and where they diverge
The webinars were the clearest part of the required program on the board’s policy role, and they also show how unsettled the vocabulary is. The quotations below are from the automatically generated captions and may contain transcription errors.
- Different terms for the same thing. Module 7 distinguishes policies from procedures. The community engagement webinar instead distinguishes “governance policies” set by trustees from “administrative policies” or “operational policies” developed by staff. A trustee who reads the module and watches the webinar meets two vocabularies for one distinction, and neither matches the “what” and “how” of Module 8.
- The problem is acknowledged. The same presenter, who described reviewing policy manuals “with boards right across the province”, said that “the majority of boards have, uh, governance policies embedded with administrative policies”, and that most boards do not monitor whether their policies are followed. In a live poll, just under three quarters of participants said their board had specific policies on parent and community engagement; about 40 per cent said their board monitored compliance with those policies, about a quarter said it did not, and about a third were not sure.
- Roles set aside. In the conflict resolution webinar, the presenter turned to trustee roles and responsibilities and said: “We’re not gonna go over that. That’s a whole session.” The module that covers them, Module 3, was not required.
- A recommendation to do all of it. The same presenter urged trustees to read all of their board’s policies and to “do all of OSCs [OESC’s] modules, whether you’re mandated to do it or not”.
In our review of board documents, the recurring problems include exactly these: policies that read as staff steps, procedures that carry rules no board adopted, and plans that are statements of vision rather than commitments. Training materials that define two of the three instruments in an optional module, leave the third undefined, describe a plan as a policy, and use different terms for the same distinction from one component to the next are likely part of the explanation. That is an inference, not a finding about any board, but it is the obvious one.
4. The Education Act duties the training does not explain
A trustee’s governance duties are not general. The Education Act and the Ministry’s memoranda require boards to adopt specific policies and specific plans, with specific content, consultation and publication. Trustees vote on those instruments, and s. 218.1(a) requires each trustee to “carry out his or her responsibilities in a manner that assists the board in fulfilling its duties under this Act, the regulations and the guidelines issued under this Act, including but not limited to the board’s duties under section 169.1”. The training does not explain what those duties are or how a board discharges them.
We searched the text of all 21 module pages and reviewed the captions of the four webinars. None covers:
- the bullying prevention and intervention plan every board must establish, consult on, publish and review (s. 303.3), or the bullying policies the board must adopt (s. 302(3.4));
- the multi-year accessibility plan (O. Reg. 191/11, s. 4) or the special education plan (Reg. 306, s. 2);
- a board’s own mental health and addictions strategy and action plan (PPM 169); the only mention of a mental health strategy in the modules refers to the province’s;
- the Ministry memoranda that set the content of board codes of conduct and bullying policies (PPM 128 and PPM 144).
The module titled Legal Aspects of School Board Governance (Module 11, last updated in June 2019, with uncaptioned videos produced in 2011) covers three things: trustees’ quasi-judicial decisions on student discipline, transfers and teacher termination; the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act; and access and privacy legislation. It does not address the board’s duties to make policy and keep plans.
Module 7 comes closest. It tells trustees that “It is important to know when a particular initiative is a matter of compliance or due diligence”, that “Policies must be entirely compliant with prevailing law where appropriate, but there is no need to develop policies to restate mandated actions”, and that policies should be reviewed regularly for “their compliance with applicable legislation and government policy directives.” Its examples of compliance are balancing the budget, trustee codes of conduct and access to information. It does not tell a trustee which requirements the board’s own policies must contain, which plans the law requires, or how the board should check that each has been met. A trustee reading that there is “no need to develop policies to restate mandated actions” is not told that some memoranda require boards to write specific content into their own policies.
This is the gap our guides were written to fill. The trustee guide sets out each required plan, its authority, its consultation and publication rules and its review cycle, and a checklist for each instrument. It should not fall to an independent research site to do that. It belongs in the training the province requires.
5. Why the omission matters
The gap would matter less if the province treated roles and policy as secondary. Its own record shows the opposite.
The Education Act has allowed the Minister to “establish policies and guidelines respecting the roles and responsibilities of board members, directors of education, supervisory officers, principals, system principals, superintendents and other officials” since 1998 (s. 8(1), para. 3.4). The training power added in 2023 sits directly beneath it in the same list. The province has had the authority to define roles for almost three decades, and the authority to require training on them since 2023.
When the Ministry has assessed boards, roles and policy have been at the centre. Its operational reviews, carried out between 2008 and 2012, asked whether “The board of trustees and senior administration have appropriate processes for the establishment and regular maintenance of policies and administrative procedures for the efficient and effective operation of the board.” In at least one review, of the Toronto District School Board in April 2010, the review recorded no evidence that this practice had been adopted (Ontario Ministry of Education 2010).
When the Minister has intervened, policy has again been at the centre. Following a governance review of the Near North District School Board, the Minister’s directions, published on 30 October 2025, required the board to submit a timeline “for a review and update of its policies and procedures, including ensuring that these are distinguished from the board’s current administrative guidelines”, with all policies to be updated by the end of the 2025-26 school year (Ontario Ministry of Education 2025b). The Ministry’s page reports that the board has been placed under provincial supervision. The directions were published two months after the deadline for the mandatory training, which did not include the modules that explain the distinction they required.
The stakes are rising. The Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026 added s. 283.0.3 to the Education Act, which allows the Minister to require that board resolutions be confirmed by the chair, the director or another official before they take effect. A proposed regulation, posted on 7 August 2026 with comments due on 12 August, would have the chief executive officer, who is also the director of education, confirm most board resolutions and motions (Ontario Regulatory Registry 2026). The CEO would be required to refuse to confirm any resolution that would contravene statutes, regulations, or “any policy, guideline or directive under the Education Act that the board is required to comply with”. As at 25 September 2026 the proposal was closed for comment and showed no regulation number. If a regulation is made, the line between what a board decides by policy and what staff decide operationally will carry legal consequences, and trustees will need to know both where that line falls and which policies and directives bind their board, the subject of section 4.
6. Why all of it should be required, updated and captioned
There is no evident reason for any part of the program to be optional.
- It already exists. The 21 modules were written by the sector for trustees, and are hosted and maintained by OESC with the four trustee associations.
- It is openly available. Every module is a public web page that can be read without an account.
- The mechanism already exists. OESC said it would track completion of the required program and report it to the Ministry, and where training is required under paragraph 3.4.1, boards must keep completion records for four years (s. 8(2)). Adding modules to the required list changes a list, not a system.
- The burden is small. The six required modules come to about two hours of reading, and the webinars to just under six hours of viewing. The whole program is longer, but it is spread over a four-year term.
- The Minister has the power. Paragraph 3.4.1 lets the Minister set “the content, timing and frequency” of required training. Nothing in it limits the required content to a subset.
- The duties are not optional. Every trustee is bound by s. 218.1 from the day they take office, and every board must adopt the policies and plans the Act and the memoranda require. Training on some of those duties and not others leaves trustees to learn the rest on the job, from the staff they are meant to oversee.
- The sector’s own presenters recommend it. A presenter in the required program urged trustees to do all of the modules, “whether you’re mandated to do it or not”.
The case for a full requirement is also a case for better material. The modules that explain how a board governs are the least recently updated in the program: policymaking in 2019, legal aspects in 2019 with videos from 2011, strategic planning in 2017. None of the module videos has captions, and the webinars rely on automatic captions. A required program should define all three instruments, in consistent terms across modules and webinars; set out the board’s statutory policies and plans; and explain the trustee’s part in meeting each. It should be captioned and accessible to every trustee who must complete it. It should also test understanding rather than accept a ticked box.
The timing is favourable. A new board term begins on 15 November 2026. Whatever the province requires of the trustees elected on 26 October will shape how boards govern until 2030.
7. Questions for the Ministry and the sector
The required program was mandated by the Ministry and designed by OESC, and the Education Act gives the Minister express power to set the content of required training (s. 8(1), para. 3.4.1). We have not found a published explanation of why these six modules were chosen and the other 15 were not. The following questions are open, and we would publish the answers.
- Why was Module 3, Roles and Responsibilities, updated in March 2025 to reflect Bill 98 and then left out of the program built to implement Bill 98?
- Why is training on the board’s role as policymaker not required, when developing, maintaining and monitoring policy are core duties of every board under the Education Act (s. 169.1(1)(d), (e)) and the Minister has directed at least one board to separate its policies from its administrative guidelines?
- Why is training on the multi-year plan not required, when the Act requires every board to publish the plan, meet with parents about it at the start and end of each school year (s. 169.1(4)(c)) and review it annually, and the explanatory module dates from 2017?
- Why does no module or webinar explain the policies and plans the Education Act and the Ministry’s memoranda require of every board, or the trustee’s part in meeting those requirements under s. 218.1(a)?
- Why does no module define a plan, why do the sector’s materials describe the multi-year plan as a policy document, and why do the modules and webinars use different terms for the distinction between board policy and staff instruments?
- Is there any reason the whole program should not be required, and tested, for every trustee?
- Will the optional modules and their videos, most of them last updated between 2017 and 2019 and none of the videos captioned, be updated and captioned before they are used to train the trustees elected in 2026? Will the webinars receive accurate captions?
- Under what instrument was Essential Governance 2025 made mandatory, and is that policy or guideline published?
- Has the Minister issued policies or guidelines on the roles and responsibilities of trustees and officials under paragraph 3.4, and if so, where can the public read them?
- Trustees elected on 26 October 2026 take office from 15 November. Will they be required to complete training, when, and what will it include?
- Will completion rates for the 2025 program be published, by board?
School Board Research’s Board Report Card, covering all 72 boards, is available at schoolboardresearch.ca/board-report-card/.
8. Data, method and limitations
The module list, update dates, required-program details and completion form were read from the OESC Good Governance for School Boards website on 24 September 2026; “last updated” dates are those displayed on each module page, and the content of a module may have changed without a change in that date. Word counts are for the text of each module page from its title to its end, and are approximate. Statements about what the modules cover are based on a search of the text of all 21 module pages.
Video details were taken from each module page and from the video host on 24 and 25 September 2026. Production years are those the module pages give (“developed in”), or otherwise the upload date the host records. Caption availability is the list of text tracks the host provides for each video. Because the 19 module videos have no captions, we could not review their content as text; a video may cover material the page text does not. We reviewed the four webinars through their automatically generated captions, which contain transcription errors; quotations from them are reproduced as captioned, and poll results are as the presenter read them out, not as published figures. Durations are rounded to the nearest minute.
We have not determined whether Ontario’s accessibility regulation applies to OESC’s website, and make no claim that it has been breached. Section 14 of O. Reg. 191/11 applies to designated public sector organizations and large organizations, and to web content published after 1 January 2012 (s. 14(2), (5)). Education Act provisions are quoted from the e-Laws consolidation current from 22 September 2026. We searched ontario.ca, the Ministry’s published plans and annual reports, and the OESC and trustee association websites for the Minister’s training policy or guideline and did not find it; that is a statement about what we found, and we will correct it if the instrument is published or pointed out to us. We did not search for instruments under paragraph 3.4, and question 9 is asked as a question. The statement that unclear materials are likely part of the explanation for confusion in board documents is our inference. This note does not assess any trustee, presenter or board.
References
Education Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. E.2, ss. 8(1) paras. 3.4 and 3.4.1, 8(2), 169.1, 169.2, 218.1, 283(2), 283.0.3, 302(3.4), 303.3. e-Laws consolidation from 22 September 2026. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e02
O. Reg. 191/11, Integrated Accessibility Standards, ss. 4, 14. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/110191
R.R.O. 1990, Reg. 306, Special Education Programs and Services, s. 2. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/900306
Legislative Assembly of Ontario. 2023. Bill 98, Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, 2023. https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-43/session-1/bill-98
Legislative Assembly of Ontario. 2026. Bill 101, Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026. https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-101
OESC (Ontario Education Services Corporation). 2025a. “Essential Governance 2025” and module pages, Good Governance for School Boards: Trustee Professional Development Program. Accessed 24 September 2026. https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/
OESC. 2017. “Module 6: The Strategic Role and Multi-year Strategic Planning.” https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/module/module-6/
OESC. 2019a. “Module 7: Exercising Authentic Governance: The School Board’s Role as Policymaker.” https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/module/module-7/
OESC. 2019b. “Module 11: Legal Aspects of School Board Governance.” https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/module/module-11/
OESC. 2025b. “Module 3: Roles and Responsibilities.” https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/module/module-3/
OESC. 2025c. “Module 9: Effective Community Engagement to Support Student Achievement.” https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/module/module-9/
OESC. 2025d. “Webinar Videos.” Essential Governance 2025 webinars: Webinar 1, Effective Community Engagement to Promote Student Achievement, presented by Marion Thomson Howell, 14 May 2025; Webinar 2, Mediation and Conflict Resolution, presented by Sheila MacKinnon, Shibley Righton LLP, 21 May 2025; Webinar 3, Financial Management and Governance, presented by Brian McKay and Tracy McLennan, 28 May 2025; Webinar 4, Director of Education Performance Appraisal, presented by Nancy Crawford, Ted Doherty and Robin Pilkey, 29 May 2025. Recordings and automatically generated captions accessed 25 September 2026. https://modules.ontarioschooltrustees.org/webinar-videos/
Ontario Ministry of Education. 2010. Operational Review Report: Toronto District School Board. April. https://efis.fma.csc.gov.on.ca/faab/SBBSB_Content/1_Operational_Reviews/2_Individual_Board_Reports/63.TorontoDSB_EN.pdf
Ontario Ministry of Education. 2021. Policy/Program Memorandum 144: Bullying Prevention and Intervention. Date of issue 25 November 2021. https://www.ontario.ca/document/education-ontario-policy-and-program-direction/policyprogram-memorandum-144
Ontario Ministry of Education. 2024a. Policy/Program Memorandum 128: The Provincial Code of Conduct and School Board Codes of Conduct. https://www.ontario.ca/document/education-ontario-policy-and-program-direction/policyprogram-memorandum-128
Ontario Ministry of Education. 2024b. Policy/Program Memorandum 169: Student Mental Health. https://www.ontario.ca/document/education-ontario-policy-and-program-direction/policyprogram-memorandum-169
Ontario Ministry of Education. 2025a. Published Plans and Annual Reports 2025–2026: Ministry of Education. Published 12 December 2025. https://www.ontario.ca/page/published-plans-and-annual-reports-2025-2026-ministry-education
Ontario Ministry of Education. 2025b. “Near North District School Board Governance Review.” Published 30 October 2025; updated 1 December 2025. https://www.ontario.ca/page/near-north-district-school-board-governance-review
Ontario Regulatory Registry. 2026. “Proposal for Regulation Under the Education Act to Require Confirmation of School Board Resolutions and Motions in English-Language District School Boards.” Proposal 26-EDU007, posted 7 August 2026; closed for comments 12 August 2026; accessed 25 September 2026. https://www.regulatoryregistry.gov.on.ca/proposal/54775
OPSBA and OESC (Ontario Public School Boards’ Association and Ontario Education Services Corporation). 2022. Good Governance: A Guide for Trustees, School Boards, Directors of Education, and Communities, 2022–2026. https://www.opsba.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/EN_Good-Governance-Guide-2022-2026_en_aoda_final.pdf
OPSBA. 2026. “2026 Municipal and School Board Elections.” https://www.opsba.org/2026-municipal-and-school-board-elections/
School Board Research. 2026. Policy, Procedure and Plan: A Guide for Boards and Trustees. https://schoolboardresearch.ca/resources/trustee-resources/policy-procedure-plan/
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). 2008. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Success Criterion 1.2.2, Captions (Prerecorded). https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
Legal disclaimer. School Board Research is not a law firm, its researchers are not lawyers, and nothing in this article is legal advice. A reader who needs advice about their own situation should consult a lawyer.
School Board Research publishes independent analysis of Ontario school board data and policy. We are not lawyers, and nothing in this publication is legal advice. If you identify an error, please write to info@schoolboardresearch.ca. Corrections are noted on the page where they are made.
Leave a Reply