Methodology, sources and limitations

1. Approach

We set out to describe the size, direction and funding of independent and home education in Canada using public data, and to be clear about what each number means. Our approach for every figure that matters:

1. Use several independent sources. Statistics Canada, provincial ministries, the Fraser Institute, Cardus, regulators and government pages, with law-firm, news and division-level pages as cross-checks.
2. Reconcile differences by cause: share versus headcount; independent-only versus independent plus home education; registered versus estimated; year; geography; rounding; revisions to the same series; and what a publisher counts inside "independent" (for example Alberta Education counts supervised home education inside independent school authorities).
3. Report a best estimate or a range, say how confident we are, and say why. We keep a figure where the evidence supports it and change one only where the weight of evidence points elsewhere.
4. Label estimates as estimates. No agency counts unregistered home educators. Our "roughly 80,000 to 100,000" is an arithmetic bracket from published material, not a count.

2. Definitions used

• Independent (private) school: a school outside the public school system, whether or not it receives provincial funding. Statistics Canada's "private/independent schools"; Fraser's "independent schools"; in Manitoba, "funded" and "non-funded" independent schools. Statistics Canada counts Manitoba's Catholic schools as independent.
• Home education / homeschooling: children registered or notified as home-educated under provincial rules. Alberta also has supervised and unsupervised streams and a separate shared-responsibility program.
• Share of K-12: in our tables, a student group divided by public plus independent plus home-schooled students in regular programs for youth. Statistics Canada's own published share (8.0% for 2024/25) uses its own base; ours for the same year is 8.3%. Fraser's shares use its own ministry-based counts.
• "Outside the public system": independent plus registered home-educated students.

3. Sources and exact attribution strings

Statistics Canada (Open Licence; attribution required; no implied endorsement; no use of logos)

• Table 37-10-0109-01, "Number of students in elementary and secondary schools, by school type and program type," reference dates 2006/2007 to 2024/2025, released 2026-11-04.

Attribution: "Source: Statistics Canada, Table 37-10-0109-01, 2006/2007 to 2024/2025 (released 4 November 2026)." For our derived shares, tables and charts: "Adapted from Statistics Canada, Table 37-10-0109-01, 2006/2007 to 2024/2025. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product."

• Table 37-10-0178-01 (home-schooled students by grade and sex), same attribution form.
• The Daily, "Elementary and secondary education: Enrolment growth slows, as school populations shift toward higher grades, 2024/2025," 2026-11-04. Attribution: "Source: Statistics Canada, The Daily, 4 November 2026."
• The Daily, "Elementary-Secondary Education Survey, 2020/2021," 2022-10-13; Table 1 (2019/2020) in The Daily, 2021-10-14. Same attribution form, with the date.
• Licence: https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/reference/licence

Fraser Institute (all rights reserved; cite and link; no reproduced tables or charts; short attributed quotations only; permission request recommended for any table use)

• MacPherson, Paige, Michael Zwaagstra and Max Shang. Where Our Students Are Educated: Measuring Student Enrolment in Canada, 2026 Edition. Fraser Institute, September 2026 (data 2000/01 to 2023/24, ten provinces, no territories). Read through the Fraser news releases (national, Ontario, Alberta), not the PDF.
• Where Our Students Are Educated: Measuring Student Enrolment in Canada, 2022. Fraser Institute (data to 2019/20). PDF not read.
• Zwaagstra, Michael, Max Shang and Milagros Palacios. Education Spending in Public Schools in Canada, 2025 Edition. Fraser Institute, August 2025 (data to 2022/23), via the news release; and the 2026 Edition (September 23, 2026, data to 2023/24), release text only.
• Van Pelt, Deani, and Derek J. Allison. A Diverse Landscape: Independent Schools in Canada. Fraser Institute, 2016 (data 2013/14). Read through Fraser's published summary.

Cardus

• Van Pelt, Deani. Charting New Horizons for Independent Education in Canada. Cardus, December 2023. Licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: cite and link; no reproduced tables or figures; no adapted tables.
• VanHof, Joanna DeJong. Better Together: How Canada's Independent School Associations Strengthen Democracy and Civil Society. Cardus, April 2026. (c) Cardus: brief quotation.
• Kavanagh, Catharine. Memo: Clarifying Public Reporting of the Alberta Education Student Population Statistics. Cardus, April 10, 2026. (c) Cardus: brief quotation.
• Hunt, David, Joanna DeJong VanHof and Jenisa Los. Naturally Diverse: Independent Schools in Ontario. Cardus, November 2022. (c) Cardus.
• School's Out for the Status Quo (Ontario independent schools, 2026) and Qualified Independent Schools in Saskatchewan: read through summaries.

Manitoba (Crown copyright; cite page and date)

• Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning, Education Funding Branch. Enrolment Report, October 1, 2025 (April 2026).
• Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning. Funding of Independent Schools and Reporting Requirements, 2025/2026 School Year (September 2025).
• Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning, Homeschooling Office pages, edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/schools/ind/homeschool/, accessed 15 November 2026.
• The Public Schools Act, C.C.S.M. c. P250, sections 1.1, 260.1, 262; School Days, Hours and Vacations Regulation, Man. Reg. 101/95.

Other governments (Crown copyright or open government licences; cite page and date)

• Province of British Columbia, independent school funding page (updated 2026-07-28), funding rates 2025/26, and homeschooling page. Accessed 15 November 2026.
• Government of Saskatchewan, Qualified Independent Schools, accessed 15 November 2026; school-division home-based education pages.
• Government of Alberta, Home Education pages and Home Education Funding form 2025-26; Education Act and Home Education Regulation A.R. 89/2019.
• Government of Quebec, quebec.ca homeschooling pages; Regulation respecting homeschooling (RLRQ c. I-13.3, r. 6.01).
• Ontario Policy/Program Memorandum 131 (2002); Ontario school-year calendars page.
• Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (Ministerial Directive MD 2026-01) and Newfoundland and Labrador (Schools Act, 1997) calendar and legislation pages, as noted on each province page.

Privacy regulators

• Alberta Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Investigation Report F2025-IR-02 (PowerSchool breach), 17 November 2025.
• Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, PowerSchool investigation report (decision 522177), 17 November 2025. The decision could not be retrieved; we rely on the joint news release (18 November 2025) and law-firm and news summaries.

Vendor-published market estimates. MarketsandMarkets and MarkNtel Advisors publish headline estimates of Canada's education-technology market on their public pages. Their reports are commercial and disclosure to third parties may need written consent, so the report describes the range qualitatively and quotes no vendor figures. We would add exact figures only with permission.

4. How we computed what we computed

• National and provincial shares, changes since 2006/07 and the "outside public" share are our arithmetic from Statistics Canada Table 37-10-0109-01 (regular programs for youth). The full series is the dataset statcan-open-series.
• The 80,000-to-100,000 estimate of home-educated children: floor of 66,228 registered (2024/25); low end from a 20% to 30% under-registration allowance; high end from applying Cardus's statement that prairie rates are nearer 6% than the reported ~3% (about double) to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba only, which adds about 36,000.
• Independent headcount growth is the compound annual rate of the Statistics Canada series: 1.7% a year over 2006/07 to 2024/25 and 3.4% a year over 2021/22 to 2024/25. The report states that range.
• Where our numbers differ from a publisher's, the report says so on the page.

5. Limitations

1. Provincial education data lags one to four years; each table states its year.
2. Home-education counts are undercounts, and the extent of the undercount is unknown. Registered counts and estimated actual practice are kept separate.
3. Publishers define "independent" and "home education" differently. Alberta's independent share is 4.9% (Statistics Canada, regular students) or 6.7% (Fraser, which appears to include supervised home education); both are shown.
4. We could not read the Fraser 2022 and 2026 PDFs, the Fraser 2026 spending per-student table, or the Ontario IPC decision (automated access refused; web-archive access also refused). Those figures rest on the publishers' releases and summaries.
5. Alberta (about 70%) and Quebec (about 60%) funding rates rest on several consistent secondary sources; we have not read the Alberta Funding Manual 2025/26 or Quebec's budget rules. Saskatchewan's ministry-level home-education funding rule was not read.
6. Provincial growth rates "since 2000" quoted by Fraser could not be recomputed because Statistics Canada's open series begins in 2006/07. We use 2006/07 as our own base.
7. We found no current consolidated national count of independent schools, no national tuition dataset and no registry of unregistered home educators.
8. The territories are not in Fraser's provincial data. Statistics Canada reports home education for Yukon and the Northwest Territories only; Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Nunavut home-education rules were not read.
9. Qentak builds software for this sector. Sections 5 and 6 are analysis and prediction. Statistics are sourced to third-party data.
10. Home-education and funding descriptions are published rules, not legal advice, and may change. Manitoba's progress-report dates are the Homeschooling Office's current schedule; the statute leaves the schedule to the Minister.

6. Data and corrections

Datasets, with source ids and confidence levels, are available on request through /research/request-report. Report an error or a better source through /research/corrections. See the corrections policy.