The number of Ontario students with special education needs is growing faster than overall enrolment, and some schools do not have enough educational assistants either full-time or on a daily basis, the province's auditor general has found.
In a report released Tuesday on special education, auditor general Shelley Spence said that while government funding for special education has increased by 15 per cent between 2019-20 and 2023-24, on pace with inflation, total school board special education spending increased by 19 per cent.
Yet, schools are also experiencing shortages of educational assistants who provide supports to students with special needs, with half of all elementary schools in one board understaffed, Spence found.
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As well, school boards are seeing absence rates among EAs that are high and rising, the report said, with an average 18 per cent absence rate in the 2023-24 school year, compared to 10 per cent for special education teachers and 11 per cent for other teachers.
"We consistently heard that student needs had become increasingly complex," Spence wrote in the report.
"Without adequate staffing, this led to difficulty managing high-needs students in large classrooms and behavioural challenges. For EAs especially, it resulted in heightened stress, more frequent physical injuries and a corresponding high rate of absenteeism."
When educational assistants are absent, there are often no qualified temporary replacements available, Spence said. Her audit looked at three school boards in particular – Peel District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board and Upper Canada District School Board in eastern Ontario.
Educational assistant absences at those boards went unfilled between 49 and 72 per cent of the time, the audit found.
"Unfilled absences can result in students being left without the assistance they need to participate safely and meaningfully in classroom activities," Spence wrote in the report.
Spence found there are also wide ranges of EA availability even within the same board. For example, some schools in the Peel board had nine high-needs students per educational assistant while others had one-to-one support.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 12, 2026.
