Strategy for Complex Systems

Alberta Education and Childcare – Classroom Complexity & Inclusive Education

Context & Challenge
Classrooms across Alberta are experiencing rising complexity as diverse academic, behavioural, mental-health, and socio-economic needs converge in single learning environments. While Alberta has a strong policy commitment to inclusive education, outdated standards, fragmented governance, siloed delivery, and uneven implementation of the Continuum of Supports have left educators absorbing system failures at the classroom level. The result is widening inequity, leadership dependency, and growing burnout in a system designed for stability rather than complexity.

What We Did
Working with Alberta Education and Childcare, we conducted a system-level diagnosis combining research synthesis, policy analysis, stakeholder mapping, and 13 in-depth expert interviews across education, health, and community sectors. We reframed classroom complexity as a coordination and governance problem, not a pedagogical failure, and designed a three-horizon roadmap anchored in a student-centred Continuum of Supports and Services.

What Was Different
Rather than treating inclusion as a placement debate, the work positioned inclusive education as a whole-system operating model requiring shared definitions, clear accountabilities, and cross-ministry coordination. The roadmap replaces one-off fixes with a portfolio of mutually reinforcing strategic bets, sequencing no-regret actions with deeper structural reform. Inclusion cannot depend on heroic teachers or exceptional leaders; it must be designed into the system.

Impact & Learning
The work produced a clear current-state assessment and a practical, phased roadmap organized around eight focus areas, three foundational system shifts, and a proposed maturity model for inclusion, wellbeing, and excellence. It has informed internal alignment, clarified trade-offs around parental choice and equity, and provided Alberta with a coherent path from fragmented responses to system-level coherence that was immediately actioned by government. The core learning: when classrooms become complex adaptive systems, policy, funding, and governance must also respond systemically; or complexity will always resurface where capacity is thinnest.