About us

Statistics Canada's Education Outreach Program, recognized internationally, aims to develop statistical literacy and data management skills among youth. We provide the following free services to the Canadian education community:

• learning resources on the Statistics Canada website
• support for teachers
• statistical expertise

We support teachers and students and give back to the Canadian public who respond to our surveys. This program builds awareness of the national statistical system, which depends on citizens' responses. Statistics are used by governments to plan essential services and by businesses, associations and individuals to make important decisions. Students who learn to collect and analyse statistics will benefit from these skills throughout their lives.

The program is built on two pillars:

• Learning resources on the Statistics Canada website
• Education services – presentations and support for statistical learning

• What is included in Education Outreach?
• Why is Statistics Canada involved in education?
• How did the program start?
• An award-winning program

What is included in Education Outreach?

• The Learning resources website, a special area of the Statistics Canada website that offers free Canadian information and teaching tools for students and teachers at the K-12 and postsecondary levels.
• E-STAT, the interactive research tool designed for teachers and students, which contains a vast database of demographic, social and economic information, and is available free to the Canadian education community.
• Census at School, an international statistical literacy project for students aged 8 to 18, who complete an online survey then analyse their class data and compare them to national and international results.
• An electronic newsletter for primary and secondary teachers, the Learning resources Bulletin.
• Education services, to help integrate Canadian statistics into teaching, learning and research.
• The University Liaison Program, working primarily with faculties of education to make teachers-in-training aware of the wealth of learning resources available through Statistics Canada.
• The Classroom Outreach and Expert Speakers programs in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, where employees of Statistics Canada share their expertise in statistics and data management with local schools.

Why is Statistics Canada involved in education?

As the nation's statistical agency, Statistics Canada's role is not only to produce reams of data about our country's social and economic life, but also to help Canadians of all ages make sense of that information. The mandate of the Education Outreach program is to make Statistics Canada information relevant and understandable to young Canadians.

Numeric information surrounds us every day: in news reports, advertisements, political and social commentary, we are confronted with graphs, rates, percentages, probabilities, averages and forecasts. Today's students need to understand what's behind these numbers, how to use and analyse data, and when to challenge their veracity.

New provincial curricula define statistics and probability as one of the five major teaching strands, from kindergarten to the end of secondary school. Young children in kindergarten are learning to collect and organize numeric information. By Grade 5, students are expected to represent information using graphs, tables and summary statistics. They need to know where to find data and how to analyse them to answer questions.

Teachers also need the latest Canadian statistics to update textbooks that quickly become dated or that quote American information sources. With the motto "Learning with Canadian information", the Education Outreach program helps teachers keep their courses relevant and up-to-date.

The Education Outreach program is responding to the very real and growing demand for Statistics Canada's expertise in schools across the country.

See article: Developing Statistical Literacy in Youth, 2003

How did the program start?

In the mid 1980s Statistics Canada began creating an electronic teaching resource—now called E-STAT—that would bring together census and time series data for schools. About the same time, workshops on Statistics Canada resources were offered to professors and teachers-in-training at university faculties of Education.

Throughout the 1990s, Statistics Canada increasingly recognized the importance of its role in supporting the education community. Free educational services were implemented, such as providing lesson plans and teachers' kits on the agency's website and offering regional workshops for primary and secondary teachers.

In 1997, a special module was created on the StatCan website for teacher and students called "Education Resources". It was renamed "Learning resources" and was redesigned in September 2000 with separate entry pages for students, teachers and postsecondary institutions. Also since that time, a more versatile E-STAT has been available free of charge on the site to educational institutions.

An award-winning program

Involvement with the Census at School international project beginning in 2003 brought attention to our Education Outreach program, which is now a model for other statistical organizations around the world.

Worthy of note, this program won the 2003 Award for Innovative Management of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. See article: Gold award.