Document T011

Motivations for School Choices by Eligible Parents Outside Quebec

Prepared for the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, January 1999

The majority of parents who hold the constitutional right to send their children to a French school outside Québec do not actually chose to use their right. The Commissioner for Official Languages, concerned with this situation, wanted to understand the reasons for this behaviour and to identify strategies to counter this trend. Circum Network conceptualised the problem, organised eight focus groups in four Canadian cities, involving parents having chosen French schools, on the one hand, and parents having chosen English schools or immersion classes, on the other hand. The planning of the study and the synthesis of results were based on a theoretical model of the behaviour under analysis. The conclusions paved the way for the Commissionner to stimulate French milieux toward the objective. Canadian Heritage has built a very good summary of the study observations.

54 pages, HTML format at the OCOL site

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